WikiLeaks Defector Slams Assange In Tell-All Book
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lost control of his site’s submission system in an internal revolt last fall, and has never regained it, according to a tell-all book penned by the organization’s top defector, who accuses Assange of routinely exaggerating the security of the secret-spilling website and lying to the public about the size and strength of the organization.
Although WikiLeaks has claimed for months that its submission system is down due to a backlog of documents it has no time to process, Daniel Domscheit-Berg writes in Inside WikiLeaks that he and a top WikiLeaks programmer seized the submission system when they defected from the organization last September, along with documents in the system at the time.
“This is the first time we’ve told anyone about this,” Domscheit-Berg writes.
Domscheit-Berg, who was known as Daniel Schmitt during his nearly three-year tenure with the organization, had a high-profile fallout last year with Assange, whom he once considered a best friend. He now says of Assange, “Sometimes I hate him so much that I’m afraid I’d resort to physical violence if our paths ever cross again.”
Along with other former WikiLeaks staffers and volunteers, he’s currently developing a competing leak system called OpenLeaks.org. His book is set for simultaneous publication Thursday in 14 countries, according to his U.S. distributor. Threat Level obtained a prerelease version of the book from the publisher, therefore quotes from the book cited here may not match the final version.
Last August, in the wake of rape allegations against Assange as well as criticism that the site had mishandled the names of informants in Afghan documents the site published with media partners, Domscheit-Berg and two WikiLeaks programmers fed up with the way things were being run, staged a halfhearted mutiny. They disabled the WikiLeaks wiki and changed the passwords to the Twitter and e-mail accounts. In response, Assange shut down the whole system, causing the mutineers to cave in. But within weeks, Domscheit-Berg and one of the programmers had left WikiLeaks for good and taken the submission system with them.
They seized the system because they had doubts Assange would handle the documents securely, due to lack of care he had allegedly shown for submissions in the past.
“Children shouldn’t play with guns,” Domscheit-Berg writes. “That was our argument for removing the submission platform from Julian’s control … We will only return the material to Julian if and when he can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly.”
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