Author of the week: Daniel Domscheit-Berg

last updated 8 January 2015

WikiLeaks’s former No. 2 is torching his ties to the whistle-blower website and its embattled founder, said John Naughton in the London Guardian. Books about WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, are being churned out seemingly as fast as publishers can print them. But none is likely to top Inside WikiLeaks. Hastily written by former righthand man Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the book describes Assange as a man who often behaved “as though he had been raised by wolves.” Domscheit-Berg would probably know. The 32-year-old German hacker worked side by side with Assange from 2007 through last fall.

Domscheit-Berg would actually do worse than dish inside gossip if he could, said Matt McAllester in The New York Times. He writes in his book that he’d resort to violence if he ever met up with Assange again, and he’s not dialing back that threat now. “He said he would destroy me,” Domscheit-Berg says, “and he would hunt me down and kill me if I would ever endanger a source.” During their time working together, Assange demanded extreme gestures of loyalty, even forcing Domscheit-Berg to dig up dirt on his own girlfriend. It was essentially an “abusive relationship,” he says. Currently, Domscheit-Berg is setting up his own website clearinghouse for confidential documents, called OpenLeaks. Despite the change of allegiance, though, he vows he won’t be removing his WikiLeaks tattoo anytime soon. “Absolutely not,” he says. “It was the most remarkable period of my life so far.”