Will this be the legacy of Wikileaks ?

Last Thursday, a group of former European Union officials and journalists launched a site they’ve called BrusselsLeaks, focused on obtaining and publishing leaked internal information about the backroom dealings and secrets of the E.U. The Bulgarian newspaper The Sofia Echo reported on Saturday that a Bulgarian expat in Paris has set up BalkanLeaks, a WikiLeaks-modeled site that declares that “the Balkans are not keeping secrets anymore.” WikiLeaks itself pointed on Sunday in its Twitter feed to IndoLeaks.org, a whistle-blowing site that has already published revealing documents from the country’s Suharto administration, though it seems to have since been brought down temporarily by technical glitches...

The challenge for any WikiLeak-alike site, especially those without a known figure like Domscheit-Berg, will be establishing credibility. Even WikiLeaks was initially rumored to be a CIA ruse in its early days, a conspiracy theory that still persists in some corners of the web...

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has been skeptical of other attempts at leaking sites in the past. In an interview last month, he told me that he wouldn’t recommend any other sites following WikiLeaks’ model. “There have been a few over time, and they’ve been very dangerous. It’s not something that’s easy to do right. That’s the problem,” he said, pointing specifically to a Chinese attempt at a leak site that “had no meaningful security,” and “no reputation you can trust.”

If even a fraction of the leaking sites that are beginning to surface prove credible and secure, then WikiLeaks may end up having an even larger impact than the government- and business-shaking leaks it’s already revealed; It may have planted the seeds for an entire new generation of secret-spilling sites.

The rest of the story is at the Andy Greenberg column at Forbes.