Citing Wikileaks secretive mode of operation, Gawker announced a new website, Wikileakileaks.org, to provide the public details of the organization’s operation. -db
ValleyWag
Commentary
August 31, 2010
Secret-sharing website Wikileaks.org’s tagline is “We open governments.” But the organization itself is about as open as North Korea. That’s why we’ve launched Wikileakileaks.org: your source for Wikileaks-related secrets, documents and rumors!
Wikileaks has many secrets, and it works hard to keep them: its funding, structure and sources are almost completely unknown. (Wikileaks’ official spokesman is known only by a pseudonym: “Daniel Schmitt”.) This is in part because Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ enigmatic ex-hacker founder, is notoriously sensitive to media coverage of his organization, sometimes cutting off reporters completely after a single unfavorable article. (This happened to us.) But as details emerge about Assange’s bizarre Swedish sexual molestation case, its becoming clear that there’s more to him than his cool demeanor and lofty proclamations suggest.
This doesn’t exactly fit with the site’s ethos of radical transparency. In many ways Wikileaks really has opened things up, breaking big stories and providing a much-needed check on excessive government secrecy. But championing transparency at all costs has lead to some controversial moves, too: For example, its leak of nearly 100,000 classified Afghanistan war documents may have put America’s Afghan informants’ lives at risk. And the organization has recently come under fire for releasing uncensored court documents from a lurid Belgian pedophile-serial killer case, one which contains dubious allegations against a notable politician and details about underage victims.
It’s time to give Wikileaks the Wikileaks treatment—expose it to the same sort of radical transparency it advocates and see what turns up. We’ve launched Wikileakileaks.org as a place for tipsters to share documents, secrets and rumors relating to any aspect of the organization. Your anonymity will be totally protected if you send in info. And we’ll vet whatever we get and post it with commentary. So head on over to Wikileakileaks.org, or email leaks@wikileakileaks.org, and let’s open up Wikileaks.
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