Wikileaks' German team member Daniel Schmitt stated in a podcast interview 37,000 internal emails of Germany's far right extremist National Democratic Party (NPD) are on the verge of being released. Wikileaks is currently in the process of designing a tool which will allow people to browse and comment on individual emails. It will be similar to The Guardian's MP expenses site - Wikileaks actually talked to The Guardian about using the platform the newspaper had developed. Different tools however will be required for the NPD emails. Daniel Schmitt also commented on the decrypted US military video which will be released during a press conference this coming Monday. Julian Assange, Wikileaks' spokesperson, twittered last week he and his colleagues were being observed by agents with US State Department IDs and members of an Icelandic security company. Wikileaks still has no clue who the people that were tailing them actually work for and what their intentions are - althought it is plausible they are interested in the video Wikileaks will present in order to prepare a concerted PR action to counter its effects. Mr Schmitt would give no further information, as he had returned to Germany from Iceland before the events took place. He did however state that letters which were sent to the team during their stay in February in Iceland arrived opened and missing their content. Neither the hotel staff nor the Icelandic postal service were able to state how on earth that could have happened. One question raised during the interview concerned editorial control of the 37.000 emails pending release. Asked whether it were ethically responsible to present them to the general public, as a good bunch of the emails will concern private matters with people not related to the party in any way. Wikileaks believes the general interest outweighs the interest of third parties to stay exempt from disclosure. Apart from that, Wikileaks' adheres to the "information wants to be free" viewpoint and also does not have the manpower to sift through the entire database in order to decide what to release, or not.
TechEye
