Karlsruher Dialogues 2011

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, born in 1978, has worked for many years as the German spokesperson for WikiLeaks. In his opinion, governments and corporations keep more secrets than are acceptable, especially since the decisions of one individual can now have effects on increasingly distant regions of the world. The secrets of industry must themselves be uncovered in order for us to act in an upright manner, according to Domscheit-Berg. This might have helped us prevent the recent international financial crisis.

At the end of September 2010, Daniel Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks due to diferences in opinion with Julian Assange about the future direction of the project. As Domscheit-Berg claimed in an interview with die Zeit magazine on 9.12.2010, WikiLeaks was living off of the myth of confidentiality, and yet was simultaneously becoming a global player, a combination that he considered to be extremely dangerous. He believed that the project had reached its limits: the flood of documents demonstrated its structural weaknesses, and political pressure on the organisation was also growing. In his view, a platform for whistleblowers should rather view itself as a purely neutral service provider. It needs to have functional interfaces with the classic media, and should do some of the same preliminary work as the classic media. Its tasks are the analysis, preparation, processing, contextualisation, and presentation of information to society. Under the name OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg offers such an alternative platform. He has recently published a book entitled "Inside WikiLeaks" about his experiences there.