WikiLeaks to have rival site

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LONDON, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- A German who was second-in-command at WikiLeaks says he is preparing to start up an alternative to the Internet whistle-blower.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks after disagreements with Julian Assange, the site's Australian founder, plans to launch OpenLeaks in the months ahead, the BBC reported Monday. While WikiLeaks has Swedish hosts, it wasn't clear where Domscheit-Berg intends to base his operations.

Domscheit-Berg and OpenLeaks' co-founders say the site will differ from WikiLeaks in that it won't verify material or publish material, leaving that role to newspapers, "NGOs, labor unions and other interested entities."

"We are trying to build a community of various organizations that need or have use for anonymously submitted information," former WikiLeaks member Herbert Snorrason said.

The site's founders will address problems they ran across when working with WikiLeaks.

"We felt that WikiLeaks was developing in the wrong direction," Domscheit-Berg said. "There's too much concentration of power in one organization; too much responsibility; too many bottlenecks; too many resource constraints."

Domscheit-Berg said the team at OpenLeaks would be a "conduit" rather than publisher because it didn't want the responsibility of deciding what to publish, the BBC said.

"(OpenLeaks) aims to provide the technological means to organizations and other entities around the world to be able to accept anonymous submissions in the forms of documents or other information.

"We do not think that OpenLeaks will be in WikiLeaks' shadow," Domscheit-Berg said.