Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks’ former spokesperson, resigned on September 25, 2010, after a public breakdown with founder Julian Assange over leadership, trust, and the handling of sensitive material. Domscheit-Berg said departing staff wanted WikiLeaks to confirm deletion of duplicate files through a notary. After leaving, he acknowledged destroying unpublished WikiLeaks files, including the U.S. government’s No Fly List. WikiLeaks and other sources alleged that more than 3,500 whistleblower communications were erased, some containing hundreds of documents.
The alleged collection included material described as a 5 GB Bank of America leak, evidence concerning torture and government abuse, footage connected to the 2009 Granai airstrike, and information on neo-Nazi organizations. Domscheit-Berg disputed WikiLeaks’ account of the Bank of America files, saying its claims were misleading and separately attributing some lost data to a crashed storage drive. The dispute exposed severe weaknesses in custody, redundancy, and governance at a platform handling high-risk whistleblower submissions. His proposed successor, OpenLeaks, repeatedly postponed its launch; a public test failed to come online during a Chaos Communication Camp event in August 2011, and the project later shifted toward providing leak-reception technology rather than directly facilitating disclosures.
