Blowing the whistle on Assange

A former aide gives an insider’s view of WikiLeaks

February 19, 2011|Joseph Rosenbloom

As with Joe Btfsplk in the old “Li’l Abner’’ comic strip, trouble seems to follow Julian Assange wherever he goes.

The WikiLeaks founder courts trouble regularly by exposing the misdeeds and questionable activities of bankers, politicians, and others whose names appear in the whistleblower documents he posts on the Web. His document-sharing collaboration with The New York Times and the Guardian resulted in troubled relations with the newspapers. He is in trouble with the law because two Swedish women are accusing him of sexual misconduct, a charge he denies.

As if that were not enough, the embattled Assange has trouble coming at him from his inner circle. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a close aide whom Assange suspended in August, vents about him in “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website.’’

The book is a searing, if somewhat self-serving, account of Domscheit-Berg’s three years as WikiLeaks’ most visible public face after Assange. In “Inside WikiLeaks,’’ Domscheit-Berg, who operated under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, details the group’s history, finances, and growing internal tensions over the organization’s abandonment of political neutrality and Assange’s increasingly autocratic behavior.

Here, Assange is portrayed as a driven, technologically gifted former hacker and idealist, but a dictatorial paranoid with anarchic tendencies. According to Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s flawed leadership has impaired the viability of WikiLeaks as a secure outlet for whistleblowers. If Domscheit-Berg knows about holes in WikiLeaks safeguards, it’s no wonder. Disaffected with Assange, he and a computer ace on the staff, identified only as the “architect,’’ spirited away a key security element from the WikiLeaks submission platform. Why? Revenge was not the motive, he insists, but safety. “We’re still waiting for Julian to restore security so that we can give him back the material that was on the submission platform. At present it is being stored safely. . . . [W]e will only give it back to Julian when he can show us that he is able to store it securely and deal with it carefully and responsibly.’’

Domscheit-Berg and the architect have since launched their own site, OpenLeaks, as an alternate outlet for leaked documents, but he makes clear that the two have no interest in using the security element for their new project.

The story’s arc follows Domscheit-Berg’s journey from his initial reverence for Assange to his growing disillusion with the WikiLeaks leader. A subtext traces the personality clash between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who once worked as a computer scientist for a US company in Germany, as the latter sought more recognition and control in the running of WikiLeaks.