BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, December 17 2010

Back in 2009, Daniel Domscheit-Berg applied to the Knight News Challenge in the name of Wikileaks for $532,000 to fund a project to "improve the reach, use and impact of a platform that allows whistle-blowers and journalists to anonymously post source material." At the time Domscheit-Berg was known to the world by the pseudonym "Daniel Schmitt" and made frequent appearances on behalf of Wikileaks alongside its editor-in-chief Julian Assange (including at the October 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in Barcelona). Now, as is widely known, he and Assange have parted ways and Domscheit-Berg is part of a group organizing the launch of OpenLeaks.org, which is being described as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks, and which is promising to roll out a detailed description of its organization and plans in January 2011.

It's illuminating to compare the 2009 Wikileaks News Challenge proposal--which made it to the final round of the prestigious program but was ultimately rejected by the Knight News Challenge judges--to Domscheit-Berg & Co's current plans for OpenLeaks. Obviously, until OpenLeaks starts functioning, we are comparing two different versions of "vaporware," but in the same way that Wikileaks itself has evolved over the last year, I think you can see a parallel evolution how Domscheit-Berg and the others in his group are thinking about how best to expand the open information model as well.

The heart of the Domscheit-Berg group's proposal (full text below) to Knight was "to create a full-fledged localized submission system" to Wikileaks. Rather than contacting Wikileaks directly, whistleblowers would be channeled through their local media. Berg wrote,

"Newspapers will be able to add a code snippet to their site to allow users to upload documents to Wikileaks. By uploading to Wikileaks through their local newspaper, both the whistleblower and the journalist will optionally be able to further communicate anonymously to ensure that the story receives full coverage and maximum depth. This is especially important for smaller publications and publications in press hostile environments that do not have the legal, financial or editorial resources of larger publications and do not have a way to anonymize their Internet traffic."

He also proposed to "translate our templates into six major world languages, localize our legal information, and increase server infrastructure around the world to ensure access in remote locales."

Domscheit-Berg argued that this proposal would benefit local investigative journalism in a variety of ways, including: "Whistleblowers will have the option of targeting their documents toward particular publications, facilitating the spread of stories of local interest. In addition, they will be able to access legal and technical information about the submission process in their own language." At the same time, he admitted that there was some potential risk to encouraging more local whistleblowing:

...localizing WikiLeaks does carry the inherent risk that people might correlate the source and the document. Because whistleblowers are easier to identify within small communities, sources may be more vulnerable with a more localized system. Our best protection against this risk is that the uploads come from WikiLeaks, not from the local site, so no one but WikiLeaks will know that the documents came from a particular local news organization. With WikiLeaks in the middle, both source and local publication are protected from risk. In turn, WikiLeaks mitigates its own risk through privacy technology, expert legal counsel, and jurisdictional diversification.

Reached by email, Domscheit-Berg tells me that OpenLeaks is definitely "rooted" in the Knight proposal, but suggests that what's coming will be much improved. He wrote, "The Knight submission was among other things what I worked on for WL [Wikileaks], together with the people that have also left WL now. Sort of our brainchild within WL. The system we applied for with Knight was a very rudimentary idea of what OL is now. What we will be implementing with OL is in this respect similar to the proposal, but way more sophisticated and with many new features."

In essence, where the Wikileaks Knight proposal would have been giving news sites a widget that would redirect leakers to the Wikileaks central hub, in keeping with Domscheit-Berg and his collaborators' vision of a more distributed, decentralized system, OpenLeaks is planning to give potential partners their own self-contained and integrated platform for managing leaks. Says Domscheit-Berg, "The submission system described on the Knight proposal would have used a button like feature that news orgs would have placed on their website that would have redirected them to the WL page." And what that would have meant is Wikileaks' editor or editors making the decisions on what was important, acting as a bottle-neck on the flow of information. Says Domscheit-Berg:

"What OL is working on is providing a dedicated submission website for each entity that we work with. Fully integrated into the web presence of the org, with the org's CI etc. So seemlessly integrating into the websites of our partners. Our partners will help building out the overall infrastructure by contributing technical resources in form of servers, bandwidth etc. Partners will not only be media, but also NGOs, labour unions etc. This approach has a lot of advantages: Firstly the system will scale better with each new participant. Secondly, the source is the one that will have a say in who should exclusively be granted first access to material, while also ensuring that material will be distributed to others in the system after a period of exclusive access. Thirdly, we will make use of existing resources, experience, manpower etc [to] deal with submissions to more efficiently. Fourthly, we will be able to deliver information more directly to where it matters and will be used, while remaining a neutral service ourselves. And last but not least, this approach will create a large union of shared interests in the defense of the rights to run an anonymous post-drop in the digital world."

The issue of "neutrality" is clearly quite important to Domscheit-Berg. Last spring, I saw him speak at the Re:Publica conference in Berlin not long after the "Collateral Murder" video was released by Wikileaks. While I don't have the exact transcript of his remarks, I was struck by how he seemed to want to present a little distance between Wikileaks the organization, and "Collateral Murder" a journalistic endeavor that was using material released by Wikileaks but not a direct project of Wikileaks. It was as if Assange had put too much of an editorial agenda on top of Wikileaks broad goal of making information more accessible and Domscheit-Berg wanted to keep the organization on a less ideologically-controversial footing.

It's also vital to note that, according to Domscheit-Berg, OpenLeaks is going to be far less personality driven than Wikileaks. Writes Domscheit-Berg:

I am not a man leading my own project. I am not a leader, and OpenLeaks is not led by anyone. Same as the Knight proposal has been driven by various people, the OpenLeaks project is driven by different people also. Just because I am the one receiving most attention from me media, does not mean I am anymore important than anyone else. I am not into being a leader, and I don't trust the whole concept of leaders either. If you follow the debate around why we left the WL project, you will find that a strikingly important detail :)

At the time that Knight rejected the Wikileaks proposal, some--including the Wikileaks' Twitter account--cried foul. "WikiLeaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure," the organization tweeted. (Domscheit-Berg tells me he sent that tweet: "I had invested countless hours into the proposal, answered many questions in phone conferences and in the end no one could even tell me why we got denied.") A Knight spokesman simply said at the time the proposal had not passed the foundation staff's "due diligence" checking. Others kibitzed that the proposal just wasn't locally-oriented enough for the Knight board, which is very focused on innovative projects aimed at serving the needs of local communities.

Whatever the reasons, by rejecting Domscheit-Berg's proposal, Knight may well have done Wikileaks a favor. My sense is that the conflicting visions of Assange and Domscheit-Berg are both better served with each man operating independent of each other. The OpenLeaks model (as proposed to Knight) probably wouldn't have thrived if potential leakers were worried about their information passing through a central bottleneck. Wikileaks under Assange's leadership is now evolving more and more into a transnational media operation run by a traditional (if radical) news editor. And thanks to all the publicity generated by Wikileaks, it looks like OpenLeaks is going to be off to a flying start. The Knight board might want to consider this the best $532,000 they never spent.

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[Full disclosure: Personal Democracy Forum received a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2010 for 10Questions.com, and Knight provides significant funding to the Sunlight Foundation, which Andrew Rasiej and I consult for as senior technological advisers.]

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Here's the full text of Knight proposal (Old links online to its text don't appear to work, but a source was kind enough to send it to me):