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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bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevocably.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?
@#D%*H#&NO CARRIER
Assange said the material would also have insider information from 20 right-wing organizations. Domscheit-Berg would not confirm that.
What, did he smash a hard drive or something? Please tell me he didn't just click "Delete" and move on!
For that matter, how do you lose something irrevocably?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Surprise surprise? What that wikileaks cant find people to run it that actually believe what they proclaim?
If what DDB claims are true, he also destroyed five gigabytes of internal documents from the Bank of America. Seriously, how can anyone trust OpenLeaks when one of his founder completely disregarded the wishes of the whistle-blowers to expose what they perceived as wrong, immoral, and/or of public interest? His excuse that he wanted to "protect the sources" is over-the-top ridiculous given that the track record of Wikileaks is impeccable regarding source protection (alleged cablegate leaker outed himself as per alleged chat transcript.)
I was really looking forward to have Bank of America being exposed, especially after reading this piece.
In the end, DDB exposes himself as ultimate retarded prick.
It looks like Daniel Domscheit-Berg is trying to make the crossover to 'mainstream.' That world consists of invites for 'expert' testimony to such unbiased networks such as CNN or Fox News. Now that he has violated agreements with Wikileaks and also started a competitor, he looks more and more like our everyday politicians that us Americans know and trust..
Are we all stupid, why can't editors treat us with some respect?
_To protect informants_ former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files.
FTFY
The essential point is that Daniel Domscheit-Berg does not trust that Wikileaks can guarantee the safety of the documents. He agree to return them as soon as it is safe, however it does not seem to be like that.
There are more weird things going on like a long continued throwing of mud onto openleaks/daniel by julian/wikileaks
i am not sure who is right, but this could be covered more deeply by somebody who submits it to his journal
If you want to kill something off, you don't fight it. You appear to support the cause, but you divert resources from legitimate organizations to your own. Then you f*ck up the job, thereby protecting your actual sponsors.
Which organizations' documents were destroyed? And were they completely destroyed? Or does Domscheit-Berg still have a list of the names of the informants that can be used to encourage future good behavior?
Have gnu, will travel.
so much for transparency, even if these allegations turn out to be false as the "tiff/bad blood" between him and wikileaks is not as "transparent" as they advocate their operation to aspire to on their website.
either way, it's interesting to see where this will lead...especially on a slow news day.
Much the same has been said about Assange and WikiLeaks volunteers. If you start a culture of vigilantism, Domscheit-Berg would not be the first or only person targeted. It's a bad, bad precedent to set.
If this is true, then he hurt his own cause by doing this. The self-inflicted damage to his reputation is severe, and noone can trust him now. This is how he will be held accountable: by the lack of faith in him and his organization. Sad, really. Entirely preventable, had he taken 2 minutes or less to think about it. It is good that this information is being presented to the public, as this gives a chance for the original leakers to re-present the material to Wikileaks, if it is still available to them.
There are two things an architect of a whistleblowing platform must never do: revealing the identity of informants and accepting submissions without publishing them. I despise Domscheit-Berg for keeping WikiLeaks from publishing that data. Who knows what risks were taken to get this information on that hard disk.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
He might just as well have given or sold them to the CIA and claimed to have destroyed them to cover it up, or he may have lied about it so he can use those leaks to get his own platform off the ground, pretending they were fresh submissions to OpenLeaks (would any of the whistleblowers complain? surely not). What a shame about the idea of such a platform, being dismantled by big egos ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.
Consider this:
Before the Republican party allied itself with the bible-thumpers...
The lack of awareness of history in that sentence is stunning.
The Republicans were "Bible Thumpers" from their very creation. The biggest motivation in their anti-slavery crusades was religious. Until the Democrats starting turning against the churches in the 1960's, every major American political party... Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans... had a huge, heapin' helping of the Bible in their platforms. Even when parties opposed each other, they often used Biblical citations in their party planks. Both the conservative and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century were largely motivated by religious concerns. The Temperence movement was religiously based. The progressive movement was religiously based.
"Bible Thumping" in politics is part and parcel of American history. It's been deeply intertwined in American politics since the nation came into being.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I think this bit pure BS. There is never a proof that some digital data has been deleted. One copy has been deleted at best.... If it was the only copy, only few people know.
Why this person is still able to freely roam the streets without fear. someone betrays people, like this, and still is able to live a normal life. noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable.
There's nothing more pathetic than an Internet bad-ass.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
<tinfoilhat>It could be that DDB is either an FBI double agent, or has been threatened / enticed to go mole.</tinfoilhat>
In the end, it's the public that gets hurt by deleting this information. We've long gone past the "Who watches the watchers" question, because the answer has been "None" for a long time.
The thing I've not seen mentioned in all the responses to this is that there are really two lists - the one supposedly destroyed, but ALSO the one the leaker sent in the first place.
Why could that person not simply send the same list to Wikileaks again? Is there some reason why they would not or have not done so?
There is a lot more going on with this story than meets the eye, if the list is not simply being re-transmitted to Wikileaks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable
What are you waiting for? Go beat him up, since that's your notion of accountability. Or is it? What did you mean by that? Should he be killed? Should he be photographed, 'shopped, and circulated as head transplant donkey porn?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...a pre-crisis or post-crisis Superman?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Surely those "unknown informants" still have copies of the documents.
Many times it is dangerous for an informant to keep copies of leaked documents because if they are caught with them, or caught with them somewhere they were not supposed to be, they would be compromised. Manning, for instance, carried a CD-RW into secure facilities with music and wrote files to them during the work day. He was then able to access a non-sequestered network on his off-time and send the documents. Good spy-craft would require getting rid of such data and removing all traces of it as quickly as possible. If someone had discovered him in possession of these files outside the SIF (or on improperly-labelled/controlled media inside the facility) that would have been enough for him to get in serious trouble even if the transfer were accidental.
Yes and if you go far enough back liberal means modern-day libertarian. Conservative and liberal are labels that really only make sense in a time and place context. Which is why a little tiny part of me dies whenever people refer to parties with similar names 200 years ago in relation to modern politics.
And the Progressive Party was an offshoot of the Republican Party created by Republican Teddy Roosevelt, an environmentalist and monopoly buster. "Libertarian", "Progressive", "Democrat", "Republican", etc all representing different beliefs depending upon the timeframe you look at.
Which brings me to the silliness of party loyalty. Even if beliefs aren't shifting in your lifetime party loyalty is counterproductive. If you are a party loyalist then your party can ignore you, they already have your vote. Meanwhile the other party can also ignore you because there is nothing they can do to receive your vote.
If you want your opinion to count you can not be loyal to a party. You must give every candidate a chance and make them earn your vote through their policy positions.
nifty pink polka dot set
Clownwear is the new camo? Someone should alert the authorities.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll start randomly shooting clowns.
Finally something good to come out of all this security theater.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
Nobody trusted him since he left wikileaks. Openleaks was and will always be a joke due to the insistence on only dealing with leaks where they can track the ID. I can understand that, but by the same token anybody that's that unconcerned with being fingered is probably better off just dealing with a journalist anyways.
Wikileaks released documents from China and North Korea as well, They've never had an unbalanced animus against the US; it's just the US media and government are loudest about complaints (and understand the Streisand effect the least.)
If I leaked something, I would destroy all the information that could link me to the leak, thus the original most likely is destroyed.
A) The leaker was never found, therefore would still have access to things like the No-Fly list (that was the main thing I was talking about).
B) Those uploading are doing so with the motivation that they are helping others by doing so, at some risk already. If that were me I'd be rather more concerned the information got out, so I'd not destroy it - I'd bury a USB stick under a tree somewhere with it, and have that be my only copy - but I would have a backup to transmit to someone else in case the first copy went nowhere. Very little risk of it being found much less linked back to you, and you primary goal of making sure the information gets out is met.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
currently, there are no repercussions for being a public enemy and harming millions.
To whom are you referring? I consider people who treacherously steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, and those who help them do so while also making those documents available to the regimes in Iran and North Korea to be, indeed, public enemies. Certainly that betrays the trust of millions of people, and harms many, both directly and indirectly. Certainly being held in jail while facing trial for doing so counts as repercussion, wouldn't you say?
Or are you complaining that a person who deletes a bunch of stolen documents is the one who is the public enemy? Or is that person only a public enemy if the deleted documents are unrelated to people with whom you agree on one matter or another?
There are all sorts of repercussions for not meeting society's expectations. Everything from losing your publicly elected or appointed office to being killed by SEALs in your not-very-secret Pakistani compound or going to jail for running an investment Ponzi scheme.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why would any "leaker" send information to openleaks knowing this guy just deletes stuff rather than publish.
This guy just destroyed the organization he is trying to setup.
It's the public and justice.that person destroying documents might also have destroyed evidence that a crime has been committed that could be used.In fact by destroying documents like this he played in the hands of less than scrupulous governments the world over.Think about it .. the ones he really committed an act of treason against is humanity as a whole .. each and everyone of us , not by revealing the documents , but by destroying them without revealing their content. .. against the people.
That guy is a tool. Great job he should be in for high treason allright
A summary of what happened
There is some shit storm a-brewing between Wikileaks(WL) / Assange(ASS) on the one side and Openleaks(OL) / Domscheit-Berg(DD) on the other with a cameo appearance of the Chaos Computer Club(CCC), a German hacking/freedom of information/activism group affiliated with both platforms.
Compiled the below from articles on heise.de, spiegel.de and some googled stuff, then added my subjective opinion.
DD was a member of the CCC for some time, which got him into contact with WL where he ended up a spokesperson, financing and maintaining some servers etc. Fast forward to ASS positioning himself to be synonymous with WL and abusing unpublished leaks as potential blackmail in the possibly unrelated swedish rape case against him or if the CIA, FSB or Mossad kill him. Note that without ASS running WL like it's his personal property none of the above and what is to follow would have happened.
Now, WL does currently not accept new submissions of leaks. From what I can find on the internets their submission system appears to have been shut down since at least late 2010. I guess ASS is too busy hoarding unpublished leaks for his personal gains and doesn't really give a shit anymore about the site's original intent to get the information out into the public.
DD in the summer of 2010 called on ASS to get his ass in gear, which netted him a charge of being disloyal to ASS.
Enter stage right, DD and the creation of Openleaks in early 2011 pretty much due to the issues above. ASS was instantly on DD's ass for this of course, I guess ASS doesn't like competition.
As it happens DD took a bunch of unpublished leaks with him in the form of a backup copy from one of the servers he maintained and would only give them back to ASS/WL once they'd assure the security of the leakers. Insult to injury, the guy who built and maintained the submission platform for WL also left and joined OL - I guess that might explain to some extent why there are no submissions accepted at WL for about a year now.
What then happened was that ASS charged DD with theft - of illegally leaked documents, really?! I mean, what the hell, information is free unless it comes into the possession of ASS or what?
ASS also got a wedgie over DD, who published a book in early 2011 about the Clusterfuck WL had become in which he supposedly utilized chat protocols between himself and ASS which according to ASS are confidential and mustn't be published. I don't get it, information is free, leaks are awesome, but when it's stuff about ASS it's out of bounds? Are you fucking kidding me?
Fast forward to the past month and things start to heat up. DD wanted the attendees of a CCC convention to stress test OL to in a way as a result certify it is secure. The CCC leadership rather irrationally got their panties in a bunch and kicked DD out on charges of trying to utilize the clout of CCC for OL. At the same time the CCC charged OL that their security is intransparent. This CCC decision was apparently not unanimouos with some leading CCC members opposing the decision. Strange, isn't it? With all the bullshit ASS has been perpetrating and WL being effectively dead for the past year with no submissions being accepted I'd have expected the CCC to be sympathetic towards OL and trying to help them along so there'd be a place to leak and publish.
Now it gets weird: due to all the crap DD/OL have thrown at them they state they'll delete both the data they copied from WL, their cryptographic keys to access the material and have that process notarized because all this shit is getting out of hand.
ASS gets back in the game and states WL has no keys to access the data. Given that the data was copied from WL servers, it must still be in the possession of WL, nowhere is it mentioned that the data was deleted on WL's servers.
But even if it should have been deleted (which also would mean to me WL is insecure) ASS said in late 2010 that all unpublished leaks are contained in a widely distributed encrypted 1.4GB file with
CHRISTIAN, n.
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Trolling much? Try pushing your script in Hollywood. Maybe you can get Charlie Sheen to play Julian Assange.
DDB is a CIA stooge. He has single-handedly almost completed the destruction of WL documents which the US vowed to do a year ago.
http://www.menwithfoilhats.com/2010/08/pentagon-vows-to-compel-wikileaks-to-destroy-documents/
http://wlcentral.org/node/2170
http://wlcentral.org/node/2171
I see you linking to WL's for a year unleaked leaks.
Read that again.
How corrupt and morally bankrupt would you say is an organization whose mission statement is the publication of leaked material yet they simply don't so for more than a year?
Bonus point: how inept is WL if some "nominal member" can take and delete files from WL?
PS: the only person who singlehandedly destroyed WL was Assange who in the end is nothing but a narcissistic prick due to, well, see above.
I'd just like to emphasize this hypocrisy: 1.4GB worth of leaked material the world will only see should Assange be assassinated.
How do you think the people who leaked that stuff to wikileaks with likely severe risks to their well being feel about that pompous clown now holding that data hostage until he dies from old age? After all, it is not to be assumed that Assange will feel like letting go of his insurance any time soon.
Clearly he can't be trusted -- with the exception of course of furthering his own interests...
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
Just goes to show that various world governments didn't need to do a thing to get rid of their "leak" problem. Just them alone and they'll mutually self-destruct eventually.
Pretty sad...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I am a single male and fly at least once a year, usually twice a year. I have never, ever, been selected for any extra security. I go right through, no problem. The only time I've done anything but a metal detector was in Denver, I got mmW scanned because I was standing in the line they did that for. They used the highly scientific process of "Taking people in the line that was closest to the scanner."
Also, I it isn't as though I'm the only single male who flys. Business travelers fall in to that category quite overwhelmingly.
So if you are getting selected all the time, it is something more than you being a single male.
What is meant is that they openly take stance against some of the semi-extreme dogma that the churches push. That includes abortion for instance, but also the dumb moves of "The Moral Majority" in the 70's. When they started to demand censorship against trivial things like talking about sex and homosexuality on television. A show like "Soap" really got them going and a lot of people got fed up because it was so innocent - and comedy!
So, it wasn't as much a deliberate move as it was a reaction to various bible thumpers making an ass of themselves. Add to that starting avalanche of high profile television ministries getting busted for everything from stealing money, over adultery to various other more or less 'deadly sins'. It was a growing group of voters and someone was bound to start catering for them. The democrats filled the hole.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
http://activepolitic.com.82.nyud.net/blog/2011-08-21/Former_Wikileaks_spokesman_destroyed_unreleased_files.html
Higuita
This one too, http://exiledonline.com/inside-wikileaks-revenge-of-the-second-banana/, a few months old, but enlightening in retrospect, great insights (I hadn't see this one before yesterday):
his whole OpenLeaks model is designed to keep as much heat away as possible from the website operator, who’s little more than a go-between between the leaker and the media. Domscheit-Berg isn’t even likely to get a threatening letter from someone’s attorney. ... Dickhead or not, at least Assange can deal with pressure. He’d rather go fugitive, sleep rough and live on his wits than surrender his servers. This is the guy I’d trust in a guerrilla war campaign, the old “inflict-and-endure.”
Remember, Wikileaks has successfully battled in court before to ensure the leaked materials on its site would remain published.
If there is no such law, then what they are doing is illegal.
I consider people who treacherously steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, and those who help them do so while also making those documents available to the regimes in Iran and North Korea to be, indeed, public enemies.
Are you a full time or just part time shill?
Those "sensitive" documents were stolen by one disgruntled Army specialist, one of millions of people who had official access to those documents. If you think the Iranian and North Korean regimes spy agencies didn't already have those documents then why would you think those regimes are a threat? What do their spy agencies use Get Smart re-runs as training tools?
The reason the Pentagon and friends blew their top about the leak was not because "OMG the NorKs will know we aren't really super special pals with our Arab friends!" but because the leaks went public. Opposing spy agencies tend not to announce that they have stolen documents even though it is incredibly common place. Governments care more about their people finding out their dirty little secrets then they do their enemies finding out (eg Nixon wasn't hiding from the North Vietnamese that the US was bombing Cambodia).
We know now that Western intelligence establishments were thoroughly compromised during the Cold War when nuclear annihilation was a risk. These days the Russians probably read diplomatic cables before they get to Washington.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
A lot of conspiracy theories were swirling around that DDB was a plant trying to bring down Wikileaks, and this lends them some credibility.
Also DDB should be kicked from the Chaos Computer Club. How can someone destroy information like this and call themself a hacker? The US no-fly list is an abomination that does far more harm than good and he had a moral duty to release it. Keeping the list secret does nothing to make it more secure, it only stifles media attention. People who are on the list (or have the same name as someone on the list) are going to know the first time they try to get on a plane.
Also that info on right-wing groups could have prevented the Norway bombings for all we know. At least bringing greater public attention to the groups might have made people more aware, maybe someone would have looked twice when the guy with hate screeds all over his Facebook page bought a big load of ammonium nitrate.
On top of this, who knows what else was in there. The BoA info that was promised just before corporations around the world suddenly stopped serving Wikileaks? Who knows? Nobody will ever know now.
I really want to believe he's only doing this to try to get the heat off himself and has the info stored somewhere, to actually delete this information is horrible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Probably was from the beginning (just look at how thin his history was before he came to Wikileaks). And when he got there, he almost immediately proceeded to sabotage Wikileaks, (including destroying documents). Then he took part in the effort to discredit Assange. Now he's got his honeypot "OpenLeaks" site, which I hope no one is stupid enough to give any actual secret documents to (unless you want the feds knocking on your door).
The guy is so obvious he may as well be wearing a "I [heart] the CIA" t-shirt to work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The CIA started, is continuing to run, and will to continue to run Openleaks. They never had to break it up because it's their baby.
FTFY
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I loathe this stupid 'open parent on click' interface. I was trying to find out what your post had been moded and thanks to the damn page jumping around I some how manged to mod you 'offtopic' with out having the drop down open. So consider this mod-canceling response an appology for the temporary down-modding.
-Ric
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That these folks are not Americans. What we consider "Left" is what they consider "Right". It was explained to me by an Irishman once as follows:
"What you call liberals, we call conservatives. What you call conservatives, we call fascists"
The US skew is amazing once you travel outside the country. What our far right called the "government take over of the auto industry" is right on par with the European right wing parties goals for getting government OUT of the auto industry.
So Assange's claim that these were "Right-wing" organizations doesn't necesarily mean the US's GOP/Tea Party/Libertarians, as our Democrats are pretty comprable to the EU's "Right-wing" organizations.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Politics is an emotional matter, everyone here keeps putting up wonderful, intelligent, insightful, and above all well reasoned thoughts. The reality is that *most* people's political views are absolutely, 100 percent about feelings...all discussion, justification or reasoning is simply rationalization after the fact.
If you want your opinion to count, don't rely on any politician to listen to you. Money is what gets represented, not people. Capitalism and democracy are like oil and water.
Wrong. Votes, not money, drive politics. Money is just a tool for getting votes when voters are apathetic, lazy. When voters are motivated their demands are heard. For example the National Rifle Association is not powerful because of donations, it is powerful because its members are highly motivated and will show up to vote.
Saying its all about the money is really just rationalizing voter apathy, an excuse for not doing anything.
Similarly corporations are also responsive to consumer demands, or their apathy. Consumer spending patterns dictate corporate behavior by defining where money will be made. Basically the corporate greed goes in the direction of consumer behavior. For example consider outsourcing. If consumers had punished that first corporation that experimented with outsourcing by switching to their domestically sourced competitors then corporate greed would have said stay with domestic production.
Again, the power over the corporations is in our hands should we wish to exercise it, via our spending. Just like the power over politicians is in our hands should we with to exercise it, via our voting.
How is that different to the prez and his one way flying to destinations, paid for by a 3rd party too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.