The right-hand man of Wikileaks' Julian Assange has admitted that he destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, told Der Spiegel that he destroyed the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Domscheit-Berg said he had the files "shredded to ensure that the sources are not compromised". WikiLeaks claims Domscheit-Berg was in bed with the spooks and protected many neo-nazi groups. The files included human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups.
Domscheit-Berg also took the entire Wikileaks encrypted submission system with him to start OpenLeaks. This meant that WikiLeaks was unable to receive leaked documents online for a year.
Domscheit-Berg claims that the reason he fell out with Assange was the fear that 400,000 classified US documents about the Iraq war were being released too early without taking the time to properly redact names of US collaborators and informants.
In his book, which will be released this year, Inside WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg accused Assange of being autocratic and said the reason he took the submission system and unpublished documents was because "children shouldn't play with guns".
Assange claims that Domscheit-Berg is in contact with the FBI, helping the US investigation into WikiLeaks and Assange. He also insists that Domscheit-Berg's wife, Anke, is connected to the CIA and once stole his tin foil hat (we made the last bit up).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/62910621/Domscheit-Accepts
Some freedom of information activist he's turned out to be. Remember that Anonymous hack of HB Gary back in February and the plan that the HB Gary/Berico/Palantir cyberspooks put together for Bank of America? IIRC, it had a diagram in it with a big blue circle round DDB's photo saying "Disaffected employee". Is that why today (August 23) DDB told Reuters it's only the BoA whistleblower leaks, and only part of that, he's destroyed? He's refusing to confirm he's destroyed the other items. Hmmm. His story changes literally every week, though - last week he told Der Freitag neither he nor the other activists at OpenLeaks (if there are any) had access to the data itself, just the encryption keys. How then is he now able to give such a detailed description - only BoA docs, only what was submitted between July and Sept 2010, 10% of it is documents, the rest rubbish-stuff - of what he's destroyed?
His comment that he did it to "protect the sources from being compromised" doesn't pass the sniff test either. Wikileaks doesn't record or collect any source-identifying information in the first place.