Openleaks

Decision Points

OpenLeaks is a planned whistleblowing website. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German spokesman for WikiLeaks, announced the site in December 2010, which he believes will address structural issues with the WikiLeaks organization. Domscheit-Berg describes it as a "technology project that is aiming to be a service provider for third parties that want to be able to accept material from anonymous sources." It will launch on 13 December, 2010.

At the time of its announcement, WikiLeaks was facing a number of threats: founder Julian Assange had been arrested in connection with sexual assault charges; the site had issues finding safe DNS and web hosting; and many companies had blocked payment to the site. According to Domscheit-Berg's initial statements, he expected OpenLeaks to bypass WikiLeaks problems by serving only as a safe conduit for whistleblowers to leak information, which would then be passed on to the press, instead of acting as a publisher itself. The organization also intends to be democratically governed, rather than being run by one person or a small group. “Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers--both in terms of technology and politics--while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects,” says a colleague wishing to remain anonymous.

Despite OpenLeaks' optimism, whistleblower protections vary widely from country to country and criminal sanctions are not the primary means by which these are silenced. Civil lawsuits are by far the more common form of legal intimidation, in part because they can be filed anywhere and by any party - (see especially forum shopping and libel tourism).

Effects of libel chill, especially political libel cases which are rife in some countries (notably Canada), often shut down or chill conduits for the general use of whistleblowers. For example, the whistle-blowers who revealed details of Wayne Crookes' involvement with the Green Party of Canada became the subject of an unprecedented range of lawsuits that included claims against Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and even DNS and wiki providers. One of the most extraordinary being a claim that any linking to any web site containing any defamatory document was itself a form of publication, a claim that the Supreme Court of Canada was still considering as of December 2010.. Defendant Jon Newton, who had simply linked to a whistleblower web site (not even the specific articles complained of), was subject to extraordinary pressure and expenses. Even with major web publishers' direct involvement and interest in the case, many individual defendants like Newton were left without any help to pursue an extraordinarily expensive court process. Accordingly anyone with an excuse to file suits against Openleaks from Canada could arguably gain a court order revealing whistleblowers identifying information (such as Crookes did) or simply pressure the organization into revealing it to avoid a civil liability.

By contrast, governments and prosecutors are quite difficult to convince to file criminal charges against most whistleblowers, Assange himself being an example, as absolutely no charge related to the documents themselves was made by any government as of December 2010, and several had offered explicit support (notably Iceland which passed its Modern Media Initiative partly at his behest, Brazil  and Assange's own Australia)).

There has been no comment by Openleaks on how it intends to avoid civil suits or pressures from those in a position to file many suits in many countries, such as global corporations or persons with very extensive business interests.

source :wikipedia