If Domscheit-Berg wasn't meant to have access to the data, why did he have access to the data? The way both parties relate the story, Domscheit-Berg's exposure to the data appears to have been "accidental": Assange left the unredacted data set on a Wikileaks-owned server that Domscheit-Berg managed, trusting a obscured directory name to protect them.
By Der Spiegel's recounting, it hardly matters what Domscheit-Berg's intentions were, because the files were unknowingly swept up in Wikileaks BitTorrent disaster recovery process. At that point, it became simply a matter of time before the contents of the data set became public, with or without Domscheit-Berg's promotion.
The personality conflicts here between Domscheit-Berg and Assange and Rusbridger and Leigh are probably a red herring. The evidence we have now strongly suggests that Wikileaks was not a careful steward of the data they had; that Wikileaks own convenience trumped tradecraft and security.
That's fine and human and normal for most types of data. But most of the time, we're not dealing with the names of informants and whistleblowers in the world's most repressive countries.
I’m not outraged, more amused. Wikileaks has to take responsibility and communicate better. Especially their communication has been a disaster.
If they want to be a respected whistleblower website they have to show that they are competent. I’m sorry, but I just cannot see how Wikileaks has done that during the last few weeks and months. Based on that I personally wouldn’t trust them with anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if many other people (who, unlike me, actually have something important to leak) think the same way.
(I don’t even want to say anything about DDB.)
But I guess saying something critical about Wikileaks (even if you support the idea of a place for anyone to safely leak stuff) isn’t very popular around these parts. Ah, well.
Wikileaks was the source of the data, and not only distributed extremely sensitive information in a permanently retrievable form to a person who did not understand the implications related to handling that data, but they also (lazily) left the file available online, in a place where it was accidentally included in at least some of the WL archives circulating BitTorrent. Wikileaks certainly holds the larger portion of the blame, though the publication of the password was ridiculously reckless.
