WikiLeaks was just the beginning. Whatever you might think of Assange, it was the game-changer and it spawned a multitude of clones. Expectations about the potential of digital whistleblowing were sky high. A bevy of decentralised organisations, many of them stateless and thus hard to act against in a technical or legal capacity, would spring up. These organisations were of the Internet and thus able to bypass and route around the efforts of censoring governments and corporations.

And sure enough, a slew of WikiLeaks clones followed, many of them in more specialised markets: BalkanLeaks, Enviroleaks, MagyarLeaks. Mainstream media outlets — who had sometimes turned their noses up at Assange’s methods — tried their hands at building their own dropboxes for anonymous leakers.