Whither whistleblowing: Where have all the leaking sites gone?
by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 13 2013, 8:20am EDT
On February 3, 2013, Balkanleaks released the “Buddha dossier,” a massive trove of secret documents from the national police archive.
The cache was the Bulgaria-based transparency site's most significant release so far this year. It underscored suspicions that the country’s prime minister, Boyko Borisov, had ties to organized crime.
The biggest reveal was that Borisov was floated in the mid-1990s as a possible informant against his alleged and widely assumed contacts in the world of Bulgarian organized crime. On February 21—just 18 days after the Balkanleaks release—Borisov resigned in the face of widespread corruption allegations and rising energy prices.
No matter the act's public good, publishing the “Buddha dossier” caused trouble for Bivol, the investigative journalism outlet behind Balkanleaks. On February 11, the site stated it had been subject to a “massive smearing campaign in the [Bulgarian] media and a recurring DDoS attack on the site.” As a result, its editors fought back via blog post. “Bivol is now releasing this insurance file. The key will leak automatically if something happens to our staff."
(Only two members of the Bivol team and an unnamed contact at WikiLeaks have the key for this insurance file.)
more
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/whither-whistleblowing-where-have-all-the-leaking-sites-gone/
