Ever have one of those days, where you accidentally expunge half your hard drive’s contents, then realize, shattered, that you don’t have a backup? Me too, and we can add WikiLeaks—the nonprofit private industry and state secret bean-spiller—to the brotherhood of the crushed and traumatized.
Or at least add in part. It depends where you’re standing, and I don’t mean from without, but within, where it seems WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the site’s ex-spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg have been squabbling over critical WikiLeaks data that’s now suddenly been eliminated from the leak site’s info-repository, possibly for good.
That’s the story from Der Spiegel this morning, where former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg says he just rubbed out upwards of 3,500 files he was hanging onto. His rationale: WikiLeaks couldn’t ensure the documents’ sources would remain anonymous.
WikiLeaks had held the documents on its servers until about this time last year, but when Domscheit-Berg left (he claims because WikiLeaks had critical structural deficiencies), he took the documents with him—or to hear WikiLeaks tell it, he “stole” them. The documents reportedly included data on the U.S. “no-fly” list, several “far-right” organizations and perhaps even the ostensibly momentous files relating to Bank of America (Assange has said WikiLeaks’ unreleased U.S. bank data “could take down a bank or two”).
And now, after sitting on the files for a year, they’re apparently gone. According to Domscheit-Berg, the documents were “shredded over the past few days in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised.”
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One Response
YWN tell it as it really is. Former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg left after another news organization published the full text of the allegations of sexual impropriety being made against Assange after Assange had pressured heavily to have the document censored. What is good for the goose is good for the gander was basically what Domscheit-Berg said as he left.