Wall Street Journal launches WikiLeaks rival

WASHINGTON—The Wall Street Journal launched a WikiLeaks rival called “SafeHouse” on Thursday, calling for online submissions to help uncover fraud and abuse in business and politics.

“If you have newsworthy contracts, correspondence, emails, financial records or databases from companies, government agencies or non-profits, you can send them to us using the SafeHouse service,” the Journal said at wsj.safehouse.com.

The newspaper said SafeHouse’s security features include file encryption and the possibility for a contributor or whistleblower to remain anonymous.

It said the SafeHouse site was located on secure servers managed directly by Journal editors.

The Journal said SafeHouse’s interests include “politics, government, banking, Wall Street, deals and finance, corporations, labor, law, national security and foreign affairs.”

“SafeHouse will enable the collection of information and documents that could be used in the generation of trustworthy news stories,” Journal managing editor Robert Thomson said in a statement.

“We’re open to receiving information in nearly any format, from text files to audio recordings and photos,” the newspaper said. “Help The Wall Street Journal uncover fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing.”

The Wall Street Journal is the latest news organization to launch a site similar to WikiLeaks, which has released tens of thousands of US military documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and secret diplomatic cables.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, told Yahoo! News in January that the newspaper was considering the creation of a site for leakers.

Pan-Arab television network Al Jazeera launched a “Transparency Unit” in January seeking documents, photos, audio and video clips as well as “story tips.”

A former WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has also launched a WikiLeaks competitor, OpenLeaks.