Former Wikileaks Spokesman Destroyed Documents

bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevocably. Among the files destroyed are the US gov's 'no-fly list' and inside information from 20 right wing organizations. Daniel Domscheit-Berg is now known as one of the founders of openleaks."

Comments

Re:Tragic...

[moonbender]

Is there a reason he destroyed it?

This is just the latest in an epic series of back-and-forths between DDB/OpenLeaks and Julian Assange/Wikileaks that has been going on for a year or so, particularly in the German scene/press. The first order of business seems to be: Don't believe everything you read, there has been a lot of misinformation spread by both sides, by other people who are involved and, worse yet, speculation by those that are not. Despite the fact that DDB looks like the bad guy, and I'm virtually certain he will be absolutely crucified here on Slashdot, DDB might just be a tragic figure and it's likely that there are no really good guys involved; Wikileaks and OpenLeaks were caught in a crossfire of Egos.

DDB left/was fired from Wikileaks because he felt the organisation was in some way corrupted/they felt he was a corrupted. Other people left along with him, people that were apparently important to the basic functionality of Wikileaks. DDB subsequently wrote about about Wikileaks and started to talk about an alternative leak sites, OpenLeaks. The book contains fairly serious allegations against Wikileaks and Julian Assange.

Purportedly, DDB (or possibly: one of the other people leaving WL) took those files because he did not think they were safe at Wikileaks. Note that the files do not contain any information on the identity of the leakers, Wikileaks simply does not store or even collect this information. They wre removed, not copied, and apparently Wikileaks did not have an extra copy (or the extra copies were all taken or destroyed). They were, of course, encrypted and he (or his allies) may or may not have access to some or all of them. Sidenote: At least one of the datasets he may have destroyed now (60k emails of a German neo-nazi party) made their way to the German media in some way, months ago. That may have been a coincidence, however, the newspaper involved is now a "media partner" of OpenLeaks. End of sidenote.
DDB says he never had any intention of looking at or publishing the stolen data himself, and that he intended to return the files to WL, once WL has shown itself to be trustworthy (whatever that means). He also once intended to hand over the files to a trusted third party, people from Germany's Chaos Computer Club. He never followed through with this promise. He was recently thrown out of the CCC, an extraordinary measure, due to this but mostly other events related to a sorta-kinda security audit of OpenLeaks (this alone would require several paragraphs of explanation).

Anyway, DDB had this very sensitive data, which he didn't want to give to WL, and pretty much no one else either. He also had the encryption keys. I think initially he talked about just deleting the encryption keys in order to prove that he has no intention of using the leaks himself. But if you don't trust him, why would you believe he deleted his keys? And now he apparently figured the only course of action left was to "simply" delete the files themselves. I don't quite understand that final bit, either.

I have tried to summarize a very complex situation full of half-truths and unproven allegations to the best of my ability. Note that I have absolutely zero inside information, I know no one involved, this is all public information (though fairly inaccessible to many Slashdot users due to the language barrier).