Today's NY Times reports on Daniel Domscheit-Berg's Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (Carlton: Scribe 2011), which I'm reading at the moment -
former staffer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer scientist who was WikiLeaks’ second-in-command before falling out with Mr. Assange last summer, writes of tensions between WikiLeaks’ core members and Mr. Assange. They disagreed, he writes, over Mr. Assange’s leadership style, his paranoia — he asserts that Mr. Assange began to travel with bodyguards in late 2010 — and the way he managed WikiLeaks’ finances.Gabriel Schoenfeld in the WSJ comments that -
When he and other core members left WikiLeaks, he writes, they decided to take much of its leaked material and a crucial system they had worked on that allows for the secure submission of new leaks. Mr. Domscheit-Berg wrote that they took the material from Mr. Assange because "children shouldn't play with guns".
Though Mr. Domscheit-Berg and the other defectors have started another leaking site, OpenLeaks, he writes that he does not intend to release the material himself, but will return it when Mr. Assange "can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly'.
The excerpts emerged in leaked pages of the book, to be released officially on Friday in Germany and on Tuesday in the United States. The leaked passages were confirmed as genuine by Chloe Johnson-Hill, a spokeswoman for the book's publisher, Random House.
In response to the extracts, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, released a statement to Forbes magazine that said WikiLeaks "has been taking legal action" against Mr. Domscheit-Berg. The spokesman also said that Mr. Domscheit-Berg did not hold significant roles within WikiLeaks and that his assertions were "based upon limited information or malicious falsifications". WikiLeaks accuses him of "sabotage" in relation to the submissions system.
Mr. Hrafnsson did not immediately respond to a request for clarification, and Mr. Assange’s British lawyer, Mark Stephens, said he was "not in a position to comment". Mr. Domscheit-Berg confirmed that he had received a legal letter, but said it did not specify any action.
Domscheit-Berg describes an organization dominated by an increasingly mercurial, narcissistic and dictatorial man whose actions threatened to subvert whatever success WikiLeaks could claim for itself. Mr. Domscheit-Berg, the former spokesman for WikiLeaks, worked closely with Mr. Assange for three years, at times sharing the same hotel room with him as they crisscrossed Europe. He thought Mr. Assange was "cool." He shared Mr. Assange's computer-programming background and his anarchist politics. "I think Proudhon's What Is Property? is the most important book ever written," he writes. But last August Mr. Assange "suspended" Mr. Domscheit-Berg from WikiLeaks and then expelled him.Schoenfeld snipes that -
The story Mr. Domscheit-Berg tells is one of hero worship followed by disillusionment. After joining WikiLeaks in 2007 — the organization had been launched the previous year — he found himself getting to know Mr. Assange better and did not like what he saw. Mr. Assange, he says, developed a "cult of personality." He told reporters invented versions of his past to foster a sense of mystery. He did not want to share the spotlight with anyone. When Mr. Domscheit-Berg gave a rare interview about WikiLeaks, Mr. Assange accused him of being a media whore.
More important, Mr. Assange and Mr. Domscheit-Berg had WikiLeaks present a false face to the world. In dealing with the public, they created fictitious employees for the organization's nonexistent "legal service" and "tech" departments, Mr. Domscheit-Berg says, and "grotesquely exaggerated" the number of volunteers—several thousand were claimed. In fact, it was only a handful, often just two.
The cause of transparency demanded not only lying but extreme secrecy. Although WikiLeaks was ready to expose the personal emails of individuals, Mr. Assange himself lived a clandestine existence, claiming that his safety was at risk. Such paranoia was just one facet of his peculiar behavior, which ranged from the incessant search for female conquests to deficient hygiene. "Julian," Mr. Domscheit-Berg writes, "ate everything with his hands, and he always wiped his fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my whole life."
Most oppressive to Mr. Domscheit-Berg was Mr. Assange's autocratic management style: He brooked no criticism and didn't even want staffers discussing WikiLeaks matters among themselves, outside his presence. "Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis" was Mr. Assange's repeated answer to his underling's complaints.
Some of those complaints involved matters of great moment. On the eve of publishing 91,000 U.S. military documents about Afghanistan, Mr. Domscheit-Berg learned only at the last minute that the names of Afghan civilians mentioned in the cables had not been deleted. (Mr. Assange, evidently, had promised the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, his media collaborators, that they would be.) Too late. The documents went up on the Web and innocent individuals were put in jeopardy of retribution from the Taliban.
More than anything else, there is remarkable shallowness to Mr. Domscheit-Berg's memoir. He spends more space detailing the gossip in hacker circles or chronicling mundane matters (dinner one night was "meat, potatoes, and cauliflower") than addressing the profound questions of secrecy and openness in modern life.
