Exclusive: The Next Generation Of Wikileaks

Exclusive: The next generation of WikiLeaks

By Mark Hosenball

BERLIN | Fri Jan 28, 2011 3:32pm EST

Mads Bjerg (L), founder of the Greenleaks organisation, poses with employees of DanWatch, investigative journalist Morten Hansen © and company director Anne Skjerning, in this handout taken in Copenhagen January 26, 2010.

(Reuters) - All across Europe, from Brussels to the Balkans, a new generation of WikiLeaks-style websites is sprouting.

Like their forerunner, the fledgling whistle-blowing sites are a chaotic mixture of complex systems engineering, earnest campaigning, muckraking and self-promotion.

And though their goals are varied, the activists behind the sites told Reuters that they share one major concern: they all vow not to repeat mistakes they believe were made by Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks creator.

The proliferation of websites to encourage, facilitate and shelter leakers is so anarchic that two aspiring anti-corporate leak sites are both claiming rights to the rubric "GreenLeaks" and muttering about legal consequences if the other side doesn't back down.

The most closely watched rollout in the leak-hosting world was the launch on Thursday of OpenLeaks.org, a site whose principal creator, German transparency activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was once Assange's closest collaborator.

Domscheit-Berg, who used the pseudonym "Daniel Schmitt" as Assange's official WikiLeaks co-spokesman, says he doesn't believe, as Assange initially did, that confidential material should just be dumped on the Internet. The bare-bones mission statement posted on OpenLeaks describes Domscheit-Berg's vision as both a safe-deposit box and a social networking site for leakers and their consumers.

Other WikiLeaks copycats, spinoffs and wannabes are germinating: activists say they have learned of recent launches of leak-accepting websites focused on specialized topics or regions -- from Russia and the European Union bureaucracy to international trade and the pharmaceutical industry.

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