A former WikiLeaks spokesman says he destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished documents that had been submitted to the secret-spilling site last year.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that the documents were “shredded over the past few days in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised.” He asserted that the documents were destroyed because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the documents.

According to the German publication, the destroyed documents were seized by Domscheit-Berg and others when they defected from WikiLeaks in 2010 and included the U.S. government’s no-fly list. The no-fly list contains the names of people suspected of terrorism or terrorism-related activity who are prohibited from boarding aircraft in the U.S. or any planes headed to or flying over the U.S.

Domscheit-Berg, who did not respond to a request for comment from Threat Level, did not appear to confirm to Der Spiegel that the destroyed documents included the no-fly list. The German publication did not say where it obtained this information, though it quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange identifying other documents purported to be among the stash of destroyed documents. These include insider information relating to “20 far-right organizations,” later identified in WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed as neo-Nazi organizations.

The Twitter feed repeated that a “copy of the entire U.S. no-fly list” was among the destroyed documents, and also identified other documents that were destroyed, including “more than 60,000 e-mails from the NPD,” — the far-right National Democratic Party in Germany – and “U.S. intercept arrangements for over a hundred internet companies.” The Twitter feed doesn’t elaborate on what the latter means, though it probably refers to guidelines and instructions between law enforcement agencies and internet companies on what data the latter collect on customers and how law enforcement can subpoena it. The Twitter feed also asserted that the destroyed data included five gigabytes of data from Bank of America.

Assange asserted as far back as October 2009 that he planned to publish 5 gigabytes of data obtained from the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, but the material has never materialized. Assange seemed to repeat the assertion to Forbes in November 2010, when he promised a “megaleak” regarding a major U.S. bank to be published in early 2011.

If the assertion refers to the same Bank of America documents, the dates don’t seem to support WikiLeaks’ statement that the destroyed documents include the Bank of America data. Domscheit-Berg told Threat Level last year that the documents his group seized from WikiLeaks when the group defected included only those that were submitted to WikiLeaks over a couple of months in mid-2010 between the time the WikiLeaks submission system came back online in July 2010 following an outage, and the time it went down permanently when the staffers defected at the end of that summer. Anything submitted before then, or via other methods, would have still been in Assange’s possession.

Domscheit-Berg had a public falling out with Assange after Assange began freezing him out of WikiLeaks activities in 2010. Domscheit-Berg, who published a book last year about his association with Assange and WikiLeaks, accused Assange of exaggerating the security of the secret-spilling website and lying to the public and reporters about the size and strength of the organization, as well as other matters such as the work the organization had done to publish the “Collateral Murder” video in 2010.

Assange had asserted that his organization spent three months decrypting the U.S. Army video that the site published in April 2010 under the title “Collateral Murder,” but Domscheit-Berg said WikiLeaks had always possessed the password to the video file.

Domscheit-Berg recently launched an alternative secret-spilling service called OpenLeaks, which does not receive or publish documents directly, as WikiLeaks does, but has set up what it says is a secure and anonymous submission system to deliver documents directly to reporters from sources.

Domscheit-Berg was recently booted from the German-based Chaos Computer Club — a hacker organization that has been widely supportive of WikiLeaks and its tenets. The organization said that Domscheit-Berg was exploiting CCC’s reputation for personal gain to promote OpenLeaks and expressed concern that OpenLeaks was insufficiently transparent — a criticism that Domscheit-Berg had previously asserted against Assange and WikiLeaks.

Domscheit-Berg disclosed in his book last year that Assange had lost control of his site’s submission system in the internal revolt in September 2009. Domscheit-Berg and a top WikiLeaks programmer seized the submission system when they defected from the organization, along with a cache of documents that were stored in the system at the time.

In August 2010, in the wake of rape allegations against Assange as well as criticism that the site had mishandled the names of informants in Afghan documents the site published with media partners, Domscheit-Berg and two WikiLeaks programmers staged a halfhearted mutiny, saying they were fed up with the way the operation was being run. They disabled the WikiLeaks wiki and changed the passwords to the Twitter and e-mail accounts. In response, Assange shut down the whole system, causing the mutineers to cave in. But within weeks, Domscheit-Berg and one of the programmers had left WikiLeaks for good and taken the submission system with them.

They seized the system, Domscheit-Berg wrote in his book, because they had doubts Assange would handle the documents securely, due to lack of care he had allegedly shown for submissions in the past. Domscheit-Berg wrote in his book that the seized document would be returned to WikiLeaks only after Assange built a secure system.

“Children shouldn’t play with guns,” Domscheit-Berg wrote in his book. “That was our argument for removing the submission platform from Julian’s control…. We will only return the material to Julian if and when he can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly.”

The submission system had been recrafted in 2010 by the programmer, whom Domscheit-Berg referred to only as “the Architect”, after he became frustrated with the jerry-built infrastructure Assange, and perhaps others, had set up when Wikileaks launched in December 2006, according to the book. WikiLeaks had been running on a single server with sensitive backend components like the submission and e-mail archives connected to the public-facing Wiki page. The Architect separated the platforms and set up a number of servers in various countries.

WikiLeaks’ submission system has remained down ever since Domscheit-Berg and his colleagues left the organization. Assange had initially claimed the submission system was down by design to stop an already huge backup of documents from growing even larger but later acknowledged it was due to Domscheit-Berg and colleagues seizing the system. Due to their “acts of sabotage,” WikiLeaks asserted, the organization was being forced to “overhaul the entire submission system.”

Domscheit-Berg had reportedly been in recent talks to return the seized documents to WikiLeaks, but destroyed them after negotiations broke down.

Photo: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and then-spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg in Germany, 2009. (Jacob Appelbaum/Flickr)