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WikiLeaks vehemently denies numerous reports that they've revealed the confidential identities of sources in recently released U.S. diplomatic cables. Mainstream media outlets drew the ire of Julian Assange's army of whistleblowers for reporting on an article originally published by Steffen Kraft in the small German weekly Der Freitag. The article claimed that WikiLeaks had accidentally released an encrypted database--and later, its corresponding password--containing their entire cache of over 250,000 diplomatic cables, including the names of low-level sources whose identities were meant to be protected. "There has been no 'leak at WikiLeaks,'" the group tweeted on Monday night, referring to the title on the original Freitag article. "The issue relates to a mainstream media partner and a malicious individual."
It's not immediately clear to which "mainstream media partner" WikiLeaks is referring, but several more tweets suggest that it's either The New York Times or Der Spiegel. Both publications have covered the recent conflict between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former WikiLeaks spokesman. In their coverage of the unredacted database leak on Monday, Der Spiegel reported that Domscheit-Berg had taken the full database of diplomatic cables with him when he left WikiLeaks in Septebmer 2011 to help start a rival site, OpenLeaks. When Domscheit-Berg returned the data a few months later, WikiLeaks supporters unknowingly made public an encrypted file containing the database and later revealed the password to unlock the database "without realizing that this would allow access to the unredacted US cables." OpenLeaks members claim the slip-up "proves Domscheit-Berg's allegation, which he has been making for months, that data held by WikiLeaks is 'not secure.'" Domscheit-Berg also made headlines last week when he told Der Spiegel that he'd deleted over 3,500 unpublished WikiLeaks documents from the cache that he'd taken to OpenLeaks "in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised."