Will the Rise of Wikileaks Competitors Make Whistleblowing Resistant to Censorship?

[Skip_In_Boulder]

Since it began publishing a trove of classified United States Embassy cables on November 28, 2010, Wikileaks has faced an onslaught of censorship that demonstrated how online speech is vulnerable when intermediaries refuse to host contentious or unpopular speech. When payment providers, service providers and even visualization software services cut off services, Wikileaks struggled to keep their site online, going down for periods of time and reducing the content they carry. But while the availability of Wikileaks content was restricted, the demand from readers and media organizations to access that information stayed strong. Now a new generation of Wikileaks-inspired websites are populating the Internet — decentralizing the concept of whistleblowing and making it harder to shut down speech merely by cutting off services to one site.

There are numerous other online whistleblower sites cropping up; here is a sampling of some of the newcomers:

OpenLeaks is the most well-known of the new online whistleblowing sites. Founded by several former members of Wikileaks, including former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, OpenLeaks aims to avoid some of the controversy around Wikileaks by passing all material directly to news organizations, rather than publishing material themselves. The source submitting the documents will have the ability to choose how and to whom information is leaked.

LocalLeaks provides an online service that will send information to 1,400 newspapers across the United States. Sources can choose which news outlets will receive their information.

Rospil, created by journalist Alexei Navlny, is an online portal for whistleblowers to share information about corruption in Russia. They're currently seeking experts who can provide analysis of the documents they receive and say with some authority whether or not they point to fraud and corruption within the government.

http://ruleaks.net/">RuLeaks is another Russian whistleblower site. A project of the Russian Pirate Party, RuLeaks is promoting itself as a “Russian Wikileaks.” It gained international attention after publishing a series of photos showing Putin’s lavish estate on the Black Sea.

GreenLeaks.org (apparent trademark owners of “GreenLeaks”) is a nonprofit organization that provides an online platform for leaking information about nature, the climate and the environment. It should not be confused with similarly-named

Greenleaks.com is a media organization that also publishes information about the environment.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/will-rise-wikileaks-competitors-make?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter