Assange's right hand man launches rival site

History

Domscheit-Berg said the intention of OpenLeaks was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks as "In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise." It planned to start in early 2011.^openleaks


Instead of publishing the documents, OpenLeaks will send the leaked documents to various news entities.
At the time of its announcement, WikiLeaks was facing a number of threats: founder Julian Assange had been arrested in connection with sexual assault charges; the site had issues finding safe DNS and web hosting; and many companies had blocked payment to the site. According to Domscheit-Berg's initial statements, he expected OpenLeaks to bypass WikiLeaks problems by serving only as a safe conduit for whistleblowers to leak information, which would then be passed on to the press, instead of acting as a publisher itself. The organization also intends to be democratically governed, rather than being run by one person or a small group. "Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers—both in terms of technology and politics—while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects," says a colleague wishing to remain anonymous.