There clearly is a need for a competent whistleblower website. Wikileaks has shown itself to be incapable of filling that role. Egos shouldn’t be more important than leaks.
Pretty disgusting how this entire press release amounts to political posturing and taking credit for the Arab Spring, with, what, one sentence about how terrible it is that names are now being released unredacted?
You can argue that Wikileaks isn't the one ultimately responsible for this, that it's the Guardian or the US government or whatever, but in their response they seem almost totally unconcerned with protecting individuals, and overwhelmingly concerned with getting credit for political revolutions.
Remember though, that the USA shared more information with the worst of these dictators, till close to the end, than the leaked cables reveal in total. This whole FUD about Wikileaks killing whistleblowers is just a smokescreen. Our government still routinely drone-bombs more innocents weekly than have ever been suggested to be in danger, let alone dead, because of anything WikiLeaks has ever done.
2) From the whistle-blowers perspective all documents have been released. Sure if Wikileaks hung onto them it would have a greater impact.
That's a reasonable assumption. Why wasn't it single-use? Aren't people's lives presumably at stake here? How many lives do you need to risk before it becomes worth it to re-encrypt a data set? Why, after disclosing the encryption key to a journalist, did Assange retain the (now tainted) file?
Wasn't the whole idea behind Wikileaks supposed to be that it was run by people with the greatest possible opsec/tradecraft crediblity? How does it make sense for that group to literally delegate all their security to a news publishing organization?
And having done that, by their own admission, how does pointing the finger at The Guardian's lack of opsec capability exonerate Wikileaks?
DDB has stolen their data; Assange has been dealt some serious allegations; and the Guardian has made an understandable technical mistake.
It's quite irrational to conflate that with the Wikileaks brand. Most of this was out of their control.
By Der Spiegel's recounting, it hardly matters what Domscheit-Berg's intentions were, because the files were unknowingly swept up in Wikileaks BitTorrent disaster recovery process. At that point, it became simply a matter of time before the contents of the data set became public, with or without Domscheit-Berg's promotion.
The personality conflicts here between Domscheit-Berg and Assange and Rusbridger and Leigh are probably a red herring. The evidence we have now strongly suggests that Wikileaks was not a careful steward of the data they had; that Wikileaks own convenience trumped tradecraft and security.
That's fine and human and normal for most types of data. But most of the time, we're not dealing with the names of informants and whistleblowers in the world's most repressive countries.
If they want to be a respected whistleblower website they have to show that they are competent. I’m sorry, but I just cannot see how Wikileaks has done that during the last few weeks and months. Based on that I personally wouldn’t trust them with anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if many other people (who, unlike me, actually have something important to leak) think the same way.
(I don’t even want to say anything about DDB.)
But I guess saying something critical about Wikileaks (even if you support the idea of a place for anyone to safely leak stuff) isn’t very popular around these parts. Ah, well.