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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bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevocably.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."
I would really like to have seen the No-Fly list. My older brother has been "randomly selected" for several flights in a row and I strongly suspect it is a name association with someone else. But our democratic republic uses "secret lists" now to persecute people. What can you do?
Right. Because so much of this would really protect informants. Like the no-fly list? Unless they randomly included a name in the middle that would show that it was a certain person's copy of the no-fly list how would that harm any informant? And if there was a random name surely multiple copies of the list could be found and you can combine the two and leave out whatever names aren't found on both of the copies.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Rather than just raging against DDB, maybe his side of the story should be heard as well.
It goes somewhat like this:
Once upon a time, there was a big fallout between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheidt-Berg, and Julian kicked Daniel out.
Daniel took his personal hardware with him, which happened to contain this hard-drive full of leaked documents.
A couple of other wikileaks staff sided with Daniel and also left. This included the so called Architect, who took down wikileaks submission-site for the following reasons:
- he built it
- he knew it was insecure
- once he was gone, there was no-one left to fix it
Given that Julian accused Daniel of stealing these documents in order to use them for his new site OpenLeaks, Daniel didn't wan't to publish them himself.
There have been attempts to give these data back to wikileaks, but these failed. Daniel insisted that after the loss of much of its technical staff, wikileaks had to prove that is was still able to protect the sources' identities. The CCC tried to mediate the exchange. Whatever happened here was not made public, so one can only guess what kind of mess it was.
If you have been following DDB and Wikileaks since last year, the mud was actually flowing from DDB toward Wikileaks/Assange, not the other way around. DDB went so far as to write a book about his time at Wikileaks, generously throwing mud at Assange in the process. There was such retarded stuff in there that it made DDB look silly, obviously he was holding a grudge. In the few instances where Wikileaks referred to DDB was to say he had been fired at some point in the past, period. No mud-slinging. This week only Wikileaks addressed the DDB-saga by disclosing more about DDB when it appeared the unpublished leaked materials was not going to be returned.
No need to speculate, stick to the track record so far to judge, and Wikileaks' track record is impeccable when it comes to standing up for whistle-blowers, to publish their leaked materials, and to defend in court the publication of their leaked materials. On the other hand, DDB's track record rather shows a trampling, not support, of the whistle-blowers' wishes.
moonbender's is probably as full and even-handed an explanation of the wikileaks v. openleaks altercation as can be put in a few short paragraphs.
The WL v OL business is an odd mess, and with deletion of data has become odder, but also clearer. A reason given by D-B for breaking from WL was "protection of data". An initial intention thatD-B asserted was to set up "media-partnerships" to provide "improved screening" for leaked data. The stated intentions, in themselves, suggested more agenda than the "battle of egos" explanation, which was roffered then, and since, and is usually raised in popular press coverage.
With a block of data carried away, that block, according to both sides, containing a combination of leaked embarrassing-to-government data and leaked embarrassing- to-"right-wing neo-nazi" groups data, and the embarrassing to "right-wing neo-nazi" group (government opponents) part being released to a "media partner", and the embarrassing to government part being destroyed, politically biased "data protection" and "media (and other) partnering" are indicated.
In analysis from beginning to present, with smoke-and-mirrors glare and obscuration stripped away, D-B's purpose does appear to have been, from the beginning, to control damage. With the selective release and destruction of specifically different parts of data from a single block, that D-B's purpose has been and is damage-control for "partners" appears confirmed.