(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A former staff member of WikiLeaks said he will launch a new alternative website that he promises will be more transparent than WikiLeaks. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former deputy to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will launch Openleaks ( www.openleaks.org ) Monday in an effort to aid anonymous sources expose sensitive information to the public eye. As of this morning, the website displays nothing more than the Openleaks logo with the message “Coming soon!” The new website will be launched on Monday from its Germany headquarters as part of a board of directors-run, undisclosed foundation, said reporter Jesper Huor in a documentary by Swedish broadcaster SVT that will be aired on Sunday. “Openleaks is a technology project that is aiming to be a service provider for third parties that want to be able to accept material from anonymous sources,” Domscheit-Berg said in interviews conducted in Berlin. Domscheit-Berg said he left WikiLeaks after a falling out with Assange over the lack of transparency in the organization's decision-making process. In an interview with OWNI technology website, Domscheit-Berg declined to further elaborate on his dispute with Wikileaks but said that “in these last months, the organization has not been open any more, it lost its open-source promise.” He added that Openleaks intends on providing a vehicle to publish leaked materials without taking on a publisher role itself. “If you preach transparency to everyone else you have to be transparent yourself. You have to fulfill the same standards you expect from others, and I think that's where we've not been heading in the same direction philosophically anymore,” said Domscheit-Berg in the documentary. Domscheit-Berg said he had issues with the way WikiLeaks handled larger leaks, including the 400,000 classified US war files from Iraq and 76,000 from Afghanistan from earlier this year. He said that it would have been wiser for WikiLeaks to publish these documents “slowly, step by step, to grow the project.” The launch of Openleaks comes after mounting speculation about the existence of copycat sites of the controversial site. Meanwhile, both WikiLeaks and Assange continue to face pressure after the site published 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables last month. Financial institutions such as Swiss Postfinance, Mastercard, Visa and Pay Pal have cut off the means for people to send donations to WikiLeaks, while Assange has been imprisoned in the UK and faces extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations. added by: ras_menelik
