OpenLeaks: the Wikileaks of 2011? (VIDEO)

LOS ANGELES (CBS)  In December, as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange faced mounting legal issues, members of the site came together to form Openleaks. I recently interviewed OpenLeaks co-founder Herbert Snorrason, who said the platform is much more than just a visible disagreement with Assange's way of doing things.

They will not only provide a "technical infrastructure" for leaking materials anonymously that protects all parties involved, but the site will represent a growing online effort proclaiming to fight the corrupt, powerful entities of the world by spilling their secrets.

"Essentially, we are only creating and maintaining a technological service," Snorrason told me over Skype. "Most digital documents provide meta data. Microsoft Word for instance embeds information on the author and the organization of the author in pretty much every document it produces. We aim to strip that information out of the files before the media or the recipient has a look at it. This can be done more or less automatically. It's really just a question of gathering about how meta data in various forms of documents (works.) We are a mere conduit."

So what's the difference between Openleaks and WikiLeaks?

"The problem with wikileaks is that it tries to do too many things. Wikileaks has a centralized spot where it takes on a awful lot of work, an awful lot of responsibility and an awful lot of power. Our aim is to disperse all of those... I personally left WikiLeaks after Julian said to me "I am the heart and soul of this organization and if you have a problem with me you can piss off.'I do not want to have any sort of person who believes themselves entitled to say something like that."

He also shared his thoughts on leaked cables and information that might compromise people's lives:

"There is one security concern I will accept and that is the risk of serious assault or death to specific individuals and as far as possible, I would recommend those being redacted. There actually was an odyssey in place at Wikileaks, which was that redcations requested by the source would be performed and no other. In my belief that is the policy that should be adopted, because that way the decision liesa with the source and in some ways the responsibility lies with the source as well... If there is such a danger, the best approach would probably be to contact those people before the document is released."

"What needs to be understood is that what's going is a movement that is considerably larger than what you see on the surface. It's like a hydra, you cut one head off and two new ones appear. That really is the case with what's going on here. I'm in this because I want information to be generally available. Governments, corporations don't have an unlimited right to secrecy."