NGO brands WikiLeaks whistleblowing unreliable

The rise of social media – Facebook, Twitter, Buzz – has made it increasingly hard for individuals to control data privacy.

Now governments and corporations are facing an additional threat to confidentiality through the website WikiLeaks.

Lauded by journalists and freedom of information campaigners, WikiLeaks, set up in 2007, is the site that recently revealed of a series of classified US government papers about the war in Afghanistan.

But the Swiss branch of Transparency International, an NGO campaigning for more openness and better governance, claims the site is not reliable.

"I know other platforms for transparency use it a lot . . . but it’s not based on fact," Anne Schwöbel, director of Transparency International Switzerland told Swisster.

"WikiLeaks is not enough for us – we need other sources," said Schwöbel.

Schwöbel’s reservations notwithstanding, the site has become increasingly popular; several attempts to access its links on Wednesday and Thursday this week were blocked due to heavy traffic.

Images of a military shoot up released by the site in April shocked the world gaining the site futher notoriety.

WikiLeaks, run by the Sunshine Press group, hosted a 2007 classified US military video showing a US Army helicopter crew shooting civilians, including two journalists, on a Baghdad street.

The site serves as "an anonymous global avenue for disseminating documents the public should see," according to its administrators.

While Swiss federal government documents have yet to be leaked to the site, businesses in Switzerland have been affected.

Zurich private bank Julius Baer was the subject of a 2008 posting that alleged illegal conduct by the firm’s Cayman Islands office.

The site was taken down after Julius Baer sued WikiLeaks and the WikiLeaks.org domain registrar, Dynadot, in a California court.

"Stolen and forged documents had been posted on the site," Martin Somogyi, bank spokesman, told Swisster on Thursday.

However, the judge in the case reversed the ruling after hearing arguments from free speech groups representing American readers of WikiLeaks.

"We didn’t go after WikiLeaks, we just wanted the data taken down," said Somogyi.

Another high-profile case concerned Trafigura, the commodity trader that runs much of its operations out of Lucerne.

In September 2009 WikiLeaks posted a report about toxic waste dumping in West Africa that Carter-Ruck, lawyers for Trafigura, had banned a British newspaper from publishing.

The Sunshine Press sees its site as a public tool to advance transparency beyond existing freedom of information legislation.

Government officials, corporate whistleblowers and journalists seeking anonymity can upload documents that sit in a queue waiting for a team of professional journalists and anti-corruption analysts to decide whether they should be published.

Schwöbel said she could not find out enough about selection criteria used by the editoral board of powerful decision makers.

Once a document published it is "essentially impossible to censor" it, say administrators.

The site says: "WikiLeaks does not accept rumour, opinion or other kinds of first-hand reporting or material that is already publicly available."

But in addition to hosting leaked documents, it also publishes viewpoints on ethical issues, such as an article written by anti-corruption campaigner Aikens Adusai, entitled "Switzerland: a parasite feeding on a developing world".

The article claimed Swiss banks accepted money from dictators, including Obiang Nguema, the Equatorial Guinean dictator who presides over the notorious Black Beach prison, and Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of Congo-Brazaville, famous for running up lavish hotel bills at UN conferences.

It appears to be a subjective mix of other media reports the author has read.

A spokeswoman for the federal data and information commissioner’s office, Eliane Schmid, told Swisster that people in Switzerland can already access government information under a Freedom of Information Act.

"We have had this law since mid-2006. The numbers of people [using the act] are rising but we’re talking in the hundreds, not the thousands," said Schmid.

"It’s used by journalists, used by lawyers and sometimes by companies trying to find out what other companies are doing."

Schmid also said the government is backing a more open society in Switzerland through the existing legislation.

But people often go directly to government departments and only use the act as a measure of last resort. "We would like it to be better known," she said.

Transparency International's Schwöbel told Swisster that the NGO set up a national whistleblower hotline in 2006 to advise white-collar workers seeking to expose employers.

But she acknowledged the hotline is not well known.

Schwöbel said Switzerland also has a transparency problem within the media.

"We have a lot of newspapers but they belong to the same companies," said the campaigner.

Switzerland's most famous whistleblower, UBS night guard Christophe Meili, revealed in 1997 that the bank had been destroying details of "orphaned" accounts, mostly belonging to Jewish victims of the Nazis.