Daniel Domscheit-Berg: Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website

The publisher provided this product description: Former WikiLeaks Insider and Spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg Authors an Exposé of the “World’s Most Dangerous Website.” In an eye-opening account, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former spokesman of WikiLeaks, reveals never-disclosed details about the inner workings of the increasingly controversial organization that has struck fear into governments and business organizations worldwide and prompted the Pentagon to convene a 120-man task force. In addition to Germany and the U.S., Inside WikiLeaks will be published simultaneously in 12 other countries. Under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, Domscheit-Berg was the effective No. 2 at WikiLeaks and the organization’s most public face, after Julian Assange. In this book, he reveals the evolution, finances, and inner tensions of the whistleblower organization, beginning with his first meeting with Assange in December 2007. He also describes what led to his September 2010 withdrawal from WikiLeaks, including his disenchantment with the organization’s lack of transparency, its abandonment of political neutrality, and Assange’s increasing concentration of power. What has been made public so far about WikiLeaks is only a small fraction of the truth. With Domscheit-Berg’s insider knowledge, he is uniquely able to tell the full story. A computer scientist who worked in IT security prior to devoting himself full-time to WikiLeaks, he remains committed to freedom of information on the Internet. Today he is working on a more transparent secret-sharing website called OpenLeaks, developed by former WikiLeaks people, to be launched in early 2011.





Daniel Domscheit-Berg (previously known under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt) (born 1978) is a German technology activist. He is best known for his prior work as spokesperson and effective number two in WikiLeaks, a whistleblower organisation. Before working with Wikileaks, Domscheit-Berg was involved with the German hacker group the Chaos Computer Club. He is planning on opening a new website for anonymous, online leaks called OpenLeaks, in December, 2010. A novel about his experience and separation from WikiLeaks is planned for release in Germany in January, 2011, titled "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time at the World's Most Dangerous Website". An English translation is expected in April 2011 by Australian publisher Scribe Publications. Among the criticisms Domscheit-Berg mentions are an organization culture which was too centered around the figure of one individual, head of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, an authoritarian style which was contrary to the transparency-focused mission of the organization, and a rush to unleash big news stories in lieu of steadily building up the organization. Domscheit-Berg is highlighted in the Swedish Sveriges Television (Swedens' Television) programme, WikiRebels - The Documentary, released in the second week of December 2010.





From Tech Crunch: As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stews in a British jail, with a U.S. indictment reportedly imminent on top of the alleged Swedish sex crimes he was arrested for in the first place, some of his former staffers are already preparing to launch a competing site for whistleblowers called OpenLeaks. The new site will be headed up by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s former right-hand man who left last September, after bristling under Assange’s autocratic ways. OpenLeaks will be structured a bit differently than WikiLeaks. It will be designed to accept leaks in a secure and anonymous manner, but won’t publish them itself. Instead, OpenLeaks will work with other publishers, including newspapers and websites around the world, which will asses the newsworthiness of any leaked documents, and edit and redact them as appropriate before releasing them. In this way, OpenLeaks hopes to address one of the biggest early criticisms against WikiLeaks: that it publishes sensitive documents indiscriminately without regard for the safety of people who may be mentioned in those documents. This was certainly the case with the Afghanistan war documents, and is one of the main reason why the WikiLeaks defectors set up OpenLeaks. In an online chat at the time, in reference to the way Assange handled the first leak of Afghanistan war documents, Domscheit-Berg accused him of behaving “like some kind of emperor or slave trader.”





From The Australian: A defector from the WikiLeaks website has spoken of a siege mentality within an organisation run by its founder, Julian Assange, allegedly as a personal fiefdom. In an interview with The Times the German defector gave a blistering insider's insight into the workings of WikiLeaks, which appears to operate as secretly as the institutions that it infiltrates. Until this month "Daniel Schmitt" was the second most public face of WikiLeaks after Mr Assange, giving hundreds of interviews in defence of the organisation's mission to put classified documents directly on the internet. This was his first interview with the international media since breaking cover at the weekend. He has dropped his pseudonym and now uses his real name, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. He is 32, a former hacker and lives in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin with his wife, an expert on e-governance. Initially, the WikiLeaks experiment was hailed as a turning point in investigative journalism and Mr Domscheit-Berg, as its press spokesman, was at the helm. Then things started to go wrong. "The aim of the platform when it started in 2006 was to inform intelligent people and supply them with a basis of solid facts for intelligent decisions," he told The Times. "But it became a problem as soon as we started to take sides."

Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

ABC News recently invoked the author and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, in this report on Wikileaks: Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," an investigation of the rise of Al-Qaida and the events leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He relied in part on internal State Department documents, the kind WikiLeaks has just released by the hundreds of thousands. "That was really helpful. I'd hate not to have such inside glimpses," Wright says of the documents he obtained, including how the State Department dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sees the short-term advantage to WikiLeaks, but wonders if books such as his will become harder to write. "I worry that there will be a backlash in terms of classification, so that more information that would be considered merely confidential will be termed top secret and kept from wider distribution, so that people on the ground who could put such knowledge to work, won't have access to it." See that ABC News report here.

Joseph Menn: Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet

From fserror.com (promotional website for the book): Joseph Menn’s third book, “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet,” was published in the US in January 2010 and in the UK in February 2010 by PublicAffairs Books. Part true-life thriller and part expose, it became an immediate bestseller, with Menn interviewed on national television and radio programs in the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere. Menn has spoken at major security conferences including RSA, Black Hat DC and DefCon on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world’s worst cyber-criminals. He also has given invited talks at meetings convened by the US Secret Service and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “Fatal System Error accurately reveals the secretive global cyber cartels and their hidden multibillion-dollar business, proving cybercrime does pay and pays well,” said Richard A. Clarke, special advisor to President George W. Bush for cyber security and author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.” The New Yorker magazine said it was “riveted” by the tale, comparing it to the novels of Stieg Larsson, while Business Week called it “a fascinating high-tech whodunit.” Fatal System Error has been placed on the official reading list of the US Strategic Command and is being translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Menn has reported on technology for more than a decade at the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly from his current base in San Francisco. His coverage areas for the FT include technology security and privacy, digital media, and the PC industry. He is a two-time finalist for the Loeb Award, the most prestigious in financial journalism, for coverage of Microsoft and the Hollywood writers’ strike. Earlier, he won a “Best in Business” award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for tobacco coverage at Bloomberg News, where as legal editor he directed stories that revealed the landmark settlement talks between the cigarette companies and the states.



Regarding Wikileaks and the security measures that the organization's taken in order to thwart those actors that would like to see the site shut down permanently, the author wrote this for the Financial Times: WikiLeaks appears to be winning the technological fight to publish secret US diplomatic cables, hopscotching around the world to avoid government pressure and hacking attacks. The site has been forced to change a number of service providers, including those hosting its documents and providing bandwidth, and on Friday had to change its website address, moving from wikileaks.org to wikileaks.ch. “The Cablegate archive has been spread to more than 100,000 people. If something happens to us, key parts will be released automatically,” said Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder. While the shuffling occasionally meant that the cables were unavailable, they demonstrated both the group’s resilience and the extreme difficulty of keeping anything off the internet, particularly something not universally condemned by technology companies and experts. Read that article, in full, here. See also: Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Shlomo ben Ami, Avigdor Lieberman, the Mossad..., WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1 5000 [DOES NOT CONTAIN TEXT OF CABLES], WikiLeaks: Removing the 'top secret' seal. NPR affiliate, KQED, recently aired a Forum broadcast on cyber crimes and cyber security; the author was a guest there. See the podcast of that show, just below.

Timothy Garton Ash, Wikileaks, and the U.S. State Department

About a month ago, Timothy Garton Ash wrote about Wikileaks and conflicting public interests in The Guardian:

There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things. The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same. Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are "going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world". The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. "Don't even think of it," he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day's New York Times. There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict. One thing I'd bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD.

NPR brought the historian in, to opine on the leaks as well, on the show, "Morning Edition." See the webpage for that feature story here.



See also: The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, The File: A Personal History, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (Third Edition), In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent.

Majority of Public Deems Afghanistan War 'Not Worth Fighting' from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that 60 percent of Americans say the Afghanistan war is "not worth fighting." This is a record low in public support of the war. Mary Galeti, the wife of Afghanistan veteran First Lieutenant Russell Galeti, and Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs and author of "How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle," describe their observations of public opinion, and what it might mean for the Obama administration's efforts in Afghanistan going forward. We asked how your support for the War in Afghanistan has changed since it started nine years ago. Here are some of the responses we got by text message.

Download that podcast here. With The Atlantic, Rose recently opined on the whole issue of Wikileaks:

"It's actually pretty striking how generally intelligent and sensible and straightforward the officials involved have been," said Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose. "U.S. policy turns out to be pretty much what we say it is on the surface. There are not secret, nefarious, hidden agendas behind the scenes." The cables revealed a diplomatic corps made up not of soulless, colorless bureaucrats but of perceptive, human, and well-intentioned people, Rose said. If anything, the cable dump makes the U.S. look weak (and incompetent in preventing leaks) rather than hegemonic or scheming. "The United States is seen as trying to do sensible things but blocked by the intractability of various situations and the obduracy of other currents. This does portray a world in which the U.S. is not dominant," Rose said, while noting that such an interpretation may be realistic, given the truth that "diplomacy is always a matter of getting a less bad option."

"WITNESS STATEMENT OF MICHAEL MOORE" from MichaelMoore.com

Michael Moore pledged bail money to help Assange, who is currently still held in limbo, while appeals are held.

5. I support Julian, whom I see as a pioneer of free speech, transparent government and the digital revolution in journalism. His commitment to exposing the follies of government and business offers the greater society a chance to protect itself from these follies. Some aren't just follies. Some are crimes. What do we do with someone who informs the authorities -- and in this case it is the free people in a democracy who are the "authorities" -- that a crime has been committed? Do we arrest HIM? Do we try to shut his mouth? Do we hound him, threaten him, track him down and hunt him as if HE is the criminal? He bravely informed the citizenry of what was being done in their name and with their tax monies. That is no crime. That is an act of patriotism. He should be thanked and honored, not abused and jailed. It dishonours this court to be used in this way, holding this man without bail. Julian has made the world, and my country in particular, a safer place. His actions with WikiLeaks have put on notice those who would take us to war based on lies that any future attempts to do so will be met by the fierce bright light provided by WikiLeaks and intended to expose those who commit their war crimes. His actions will make them think twice next time -- and for that we all owe him a debt of gratitude. 6. I believe that Julian takes pride in his reputation and as any journalist would understands that if he were to abscond he would ruin his reputation in the media and journalism industries. 7. I regret that I am out of the country and therefore I am unable to attend court and explain in person that I expect Julian to observe his bail conditions. I am offering to stand and provide security for him abiding by his bail conditions to the value of USD$20,000. 8. I understand that by acting as security for Julian I risk forfeiture of the aforementioned sum to the crown if he breaches his bail conditions by absconding or by not attending Court as and when required. 9. The money which I will pay to the Court, to be held as security, is my own. As I am abroad I am unable to produce any statement as evidence of these funds. However I have already transferred the sum of USD$20,000 into the client account of FSI. 10. I have not been indemnified against the loss of this money in the event of Julian breaching his bail conditions, and understand that if I were to be so indemnified it would amount to a separate criminal offence for which I could be imprisoned. 11. I have been advised by Julian’s solicitors that it would be prudent to obtain independent legal advice in relation to my liabilities as security. 12. I have no previous convictions.

Read the full witness statement here. See also: Dude, Where's My Country?, Stupid White Men : ...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!, Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, Mike's Election Guide 2008, Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, Fahrenheit 9/11, The World According to Michael Moore: A Portrait in His Own Words