Adonis Diaries

OpenLeaks vs WikiLeaks:  What is your preferred strategy to disseminating “secret” documents?

WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange, is basically a publishing medium on the net, of documents received from sources in businesses and public institutions.  The main purpose is to enhancing transparency in the environment of doing business , public institutions, and in decision making among establishments so that the wide public can express their opinion and decide accordingly, based on informed sources.

WikiLeaks was highly centralized and it lacked the resources, financial and qualified volunteered manpower, to handling the flood of documents arriving from everywhere and of different nature.  For example, Assange preferred to exhaust the mine of documents from one source before focusing on another source provider, exerting all kinds of persuasion means.

“Inside WikiLeaks“, published by Daniel Domscheit-Berg,  divulges who sent sources of documents, who received them, who managed the documents, who filtered out the pieces of intelligence, and who published them…

All this stages in the process involve political decisions from the operator handling the data.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the launcher of OpenLeaks, another alert platform, worked for a year at WikiLeaks.  Daniel was a specialist of information security on networks of international enterprises; he militated for transparency in enterprises and the freedom of disseminating information on Internet.

Any censorship of documents and information is fundamentally a political decision.

Thus, if WikiLeaks demands transparency in business enterprises and public institutions, it is normal for people to ask: “What are the political guidelines of Assange and the operators in WikiLeaks?”

When an engaged person, working for a non-transparent establishment, sends a secret document, he expects that the information is transmitted and revealed.  If the document is not taken seriously, the sender has the right to know why.  The sender has the right for an answer:  “Why should I lose a job if I have no idea of the guidelines and procedures for not publishing my document?”

OpenLeaks empower the source or the sender of document to disseminate his information to his target receivers.

OpenLeaks provides the know-how of the latest technology infrastructure to the source and the right of exclusive period before the document in published in the open network, if the source allows the information to be disseminated to every partner.

OpenLeaks is a decentralized operation and two distinct groups bear the responsibility of either receiving the information or publishing the documents.  In each group, individual specialists operator shoulder the responsibility in his line of specialization.

You are expected to decide on documents that are not within your line of specialty.  For example, energy, agribusiness, municipalities of small and large cities, local politics, national politics, international institutions, legal matters…

The receiver of a particular document will verify the source and the authenticity of the document before any filtering process before publishing on the open net, after receiving acknowledgment from the source to doing so.

Thus, the partners are diversified from the sources and to the receivers.  You can be an ONG, a syndicate, a school of journalism, a media, a municipality, an international organization, a civic development association…

What publishing alternative would you select if you want to leak a document?

Do you have any other alternative strategies and institutional structure for other future alert platforms?