So I was brought up short when reading Steve Fishman's fascinating piece on Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking thousands of US diplomatic cables and US army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan who is currently in jail. Tucked away on page 7 of the New York Magazine article, in a passage on how Mr. Assange has alienated many former collaborators, he writes about how Daniel Domscheit-Berg, "fed up with what he saw as Assange’s dictatorial ways, defected to launch his own site – OpenLeaks. Perhaps more important, WikiLeaks’ technology architect departed with him. And so, for the past year, WikiLeaks has been unable to receive leaked documents online."
This is apparently well known to people who've been following the story closely (Michael Parenti, who's been very helpful with all this, was gently laughing at me on Twitter). But it's still fascinating. What it means is that the potential flow of online information to WikiLeaks, the organization's reason for being, is shut off. If you visit the group's online submissions page there is still a bullet point on "our anonymous electronic drop box" that "Its (sic) easy to submit" to.
The site explains "we have created our novel method of submission based on a suite of security technologies designed to provide anonymity. We have put a great deal of technical and design work into the drop box because we take the journalist-source relationship very seriously."
