http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/print/wikileaks_springs_a_leak_20110210/Articles about WikiLeaks are thick on the ground, but we’ve heard little from inside the citadel. Now for the first time we’re getting an insider’s story. “Inside WikiLeaks” is a fun book, full of anecdotes about the website’s wacky set of fellow travelers, and it suggests that the hacking underground has finally found a cause. Certainly, it’s the must-read, newsy book of the moment. It’s out in German and several other languages today and will be out in English the day after Valentine’s Day.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg was the WikiLeaks spokesman and Assange’s right-hand man until he publicly broke with his former boss last September. He appears to have immediately started writing a book, not so much to set the record straight—no matter how this book is billed, it’s certainly not a tell-all—but to save what he feels is precious. (This shouldn’t put readers off; though written in haste, “Inside WikiLeaks” is a fine, intelligent read.) Domscheit-Berg writes that the organization has lost its way and betrayed its principles, and that, because it went astray, he and another employee deliberately crippled it. The author claims that he and this man, whom he calls “the architect,” before their departure shut down the platform WikiLeaks uses to accept submissions, essentially locking the door to new material and walking off with the keys. He says the system still isn’t fixed and implies a fix isn’t likely.
If what Domscheit-Berg says is true, then for the foreseeable future WikiLeaks will be unable to accept new documents that aren’t either handed to the website physically or mailed to it. This means WikiLeaks is far less able to keep its promise of source anonymity. Domscheit-Berg says that once WikiLeaks returns to its core principles of transparency and openness—and applies them to itself—he and his unnamed friend will happily unlock the system...