Former WikiLeaks Members Forming OpenLeaks

A dozen of Julian Assange’s former colleagues have decided to go forward and create a new website from the ashes of WikiLeaks. With Assange trying to fight against the allegations of sexual wrongdoing, these colleagues hope for a revised website that is characterized as a revised vision of transparency.

According to Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic programmer who is involved in OpenLeaks, the goal is to avoid the influence of a single individual. Assange used to have a lot of the power with WikiLeaks and handled a lot of documents which put the neutrality of the organization in jeopardy. OpenLeaks won’t handle the documents themselves and instead will act as the middleman between the leaker and the media and human rights organizations.

Last September, many of the members of WikiLeaks had a problem with Assange. They felt that he was destroying the project because he joined his sexual wrongdoings with the WikiLeaks work.

“It’s no secret that we had disagreements with how WikiLeaks was being managed. And a large part of what we hope to accomplish with OpenLeaks is to avoid those problems,” said Mr. Snorrason to the New York Times.

The most important thing to this new website is neutrality. With WikiLeaks, it was decided what would be published and what wouldn’t. That allowed certain politics to take precedence over others. With OpenLeaks, they won’t have a say in what is published or isn’t which allows for complete neutrality.

Many other websites have popped up with similar goals all based off of Assange’s 2006 blog post that said, “mass leaking” left unjust governments “exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”

The big difficult for OpenLeaks is how they can publish information without having governments shut them down. WikiLeaks came under assault from their hosting company, PayPal, MasterCard and other businesses which made it very difficult to continue running the website.

The new founders are hoping to get going with the website come summer time.

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