Just like Groupon and it’s hundreds of clones, WikiLeaks is spawning plenty of similar leak-based sites as well. The most recent WikiLeaks clone is of particular note as it deals with leaking out sensitive information about the world of higher education.
UniLeaks is an Australian-based site that accepts information via postal mail or file uploads on its website. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a terrific write-up about the site that answers some of your potential questions.
3 Questions For You
The biggest questions I have: is there a need for a site like this? Will it actually be used? If there was a U.S. version of UniLeaks, would you use it to leak information about something?
Weigh in down in the comments, by mentioning @Edudemic on Twitter or on the Facebook page. I genuinely want to hear if you think UniLeaks is a worthwhile site or just a site hopping on the WikiLeaks bandwagon.
What It Looks Like
There are really not any actual leaked resources on the site yet. It seems to currently be in the just-launched-alpha stage but it’s still viewable to the public.However, the Chronicle says “the site’s main administrator says it has received an “overwhelming” amount of correspondence from Britain-based students and academics. That support includes at least one potentially newsworthy data dump: an ‘entire e-mail repository’ of a “large prominent university in the United Kingdom,” a database that seems to be limited to senior management at the institution.”
Want to know a bit more detail about how it works? Check out the details below.
How It Works
When UniLeaks receives a document, our accredited journalists assess the submission. If it meets the criteria, our journalists then write or produce a news piece based on the document. This typically includes a description of the document, an analysis of why it is important, and an explanation of what it signifies to broader society.
The news piece might also highlight the parts of the document that are most newsworthy. Our news stories are deliberately analytical regarding the wider significance of the document. We then link from the news piece to the original submission.
Submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via countries which have strong shield laws to provide additional protection to sources and journalists.
Some documents submitted contain highly sensitive information. UniLeaks has developed a harm minimisation procedure to clean documents which might endanger innocent people from being involved. If the document is a meeting minutes for example we may block participants who are not relevant to the discussion to avoid their names being inadvertently tainted. In other instances, UniLeaks may delay publishing some news stories and their supporting documents until the publication will not cause danger to such people. However in all cases, UniLeaks will only redact the details that are absolutely necessary to this end. Everything else will be published to support the news story exactly as it appeared in the original document.
UniLeaks, like simlar sites – has a overriding objective to publish and bring information into the public arena to encourage an informed society. It remain absolutely committed, totally resolute and doggedly true to this goal.
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