Monday saw the launch of Brussels Leaks, which pretty much does exactly what you would expect a website with the “-leaks” suffix to do.
Like its illustrious forebear, WikiLeaks, Brussels Leaks wants to bring extreme transparency to the decision-making process, with a focus on the European Union.
It’s a fairly rudimentary set-up by a group of moonlighting Brussels professionals working anonymously and with clearly limited resources.
So far, the site consists of little more than a Q&A explaining the concept and an encrypted document-uploader.
Interestingly, Brussels Leaks doesn’t seem interested in posting any documents it receives on its own website so they are available to the general public, as happens on WikiLeaks.
Rather, they describe themselves as an intermediary, “passing on information to responsible parties” – not just in the media, but also to campaigners such as NGOs.
Their theory is that lots of people working in Brussels see information that they would like to see made public, but they don’t dare put out in the open, and don’t always know who might be interested in it.
In an e-mail interview with the European Journalism Centre blog, the team says its focus will be on social and environmental projects, and hinted transport and energy leaks are already in the pipeline.
There haven’t been any great revelations so far, but the idea has generated a decent amount of buzz in the (admittedly tiny) Brussels Twittersphere.
As one diplomat joked: “I’d wager the Commission are behind this,” a reference to the EU’s ubiquitous executive branch.
It remains unclear why Commission officials – holders of most of the sensitive information in Brussels – would pass on information to an anonymous platform rather than to the usual network of journalists and lobbyists, most of whom are quite experienced working with sensitive documents.
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