Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former “second in command” to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, pledged to launch a website that will rival WikiLeaks and will offer more transparency than its predecessor.
Named Openleaks, the new website has no content yet other than its logo and the “Coming soon!” message. The website will be run by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who declined to offer details about his disagreement with the notorious website WikiLeaks, which he suggested has wandered away from its initial purpose.
He added that the WikiLeaks organization has not been open anymore over the past months and it had broken its promise to be an open source of information. He explained that Openleaks will be different from WikiLeaks in the sense that it would provide the resources to publish revealed information, but without itself becoming the publisher.
WikiLeaks has now fallen victim to an intense crackdown by the US and other governments across the globe, which also lead to previous supporters of the website to back out of deals they had with the website. The crackdown follows a series of US diplomacy documents that have cause incredible embarrassment to American foreign affairs workers, as well as other parties with diplomatic ties to the US.
Julian Assange, 39, founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and is now in police custody in the UK. The base for his arrest was a Swedish warrant. He was wanted for questioning in relation to allegations that he was involved in crimes of sexual nature, which Assange has denied.
The new website, Openleaks, has a team of 10 people and it will start testing at the beginning of 2011. According to its founder, who was involved with a group of German hackers called the Chaos Computer Club, the team is already drowned with applications.