Calling on Leakers to Help Document Local Misdeeds

The time has come for WikiLeaks, which calls itself the first intelligence agency of the people, to think locally, says Daniel Schmitt, a German computer engineer who is a full-time unpaid spokesman for the Web site. We are trying to bring WikiLeaks more directly to communities, he said in a telephone interview. The organisation has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation’s News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news. WikiLeaks proposes using the grant to encourage local newspapers to include a link to WikiLeaks’ secure, anonymous servers so that readers can submit documents on local issues or scandals. The newspapers would have first crack at the material, and after a period of timeperhaps two weeks, Schmitt saidthe documents would be made public on the main WikiLeaks page