SafeHouse is Rupert Murdoch’s Answer to WikiLeaks

The secrets trade is booming. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have proved the incredible consequences of when confidential information shows up where it's not supposed to, as well as the accompanying newspaper sales spikes. Rupert Murdoch no longer wants to rely on the whims of a third party and last week introduced the Wall Street Journal's SafeHouse.

SafeHouse is News Corporation's online attempt at replicating the success of WikiLeaks. The website aims to increase whistle-blowing on wrongdoing, whether that be individual, corporate or governmental. The site encrypts your personal information so that your leaking of documents doesn't get back to you (anonymity is offered but not preferred as oftentimes information without a background is useless from a journalistic standpoint). If your information is juicy enough it will get coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

So what's the catch?

Questions over the motives of establishing such a site have been raised. Rupert Murdoch and his broadcasters have traditionally treated WikiLeaks and Assange with incredible disdain, with Fox News broadcaster Bill O'Reilly saying Assange "is a sleazeball...bent on damaging America".  Why the sudden turnaround? Is the Wall Street Journal slighted over the New York Times traditionally getting the better (read: more scandalous and destructive) information from WikiLeaks? Or, as security analysts and conspiracy theorists alike think, is it all a trap?

Security analyst, Jacob Appelbaum, was quoted as saying that the site had a "laundry list of amatuerish security flaws", with no guarantee your personal details or anonymity are safe. The website also holds the dubious disclaimer that your identity as a source is anonymous except under "extraordinary circumstances". With no definition of "extraodinary circumstances" provided, what does it entail? Does it include getting asked by the government to give up the information? Does it include selling the source's details to the highest bidder? The absense of such fine print flexibility is what made WikiLeaks what it is - a safe haven for the tell tale and leaker.

If not a deliberate trap, the security concerns and disclaimers could make SafeHouse a fruitful hunting ground for a US government who's had enough of people knowing their confidential goings-on. Either way, if Murdoch wants more secrets, he might have to start being a bit nicer to Assange.

[via Fast Company]