Samenvatting

As a result of the democratization of technology we now seem to live in an era of ‘Wiki-regulation’. Increasingly transparency is considered to be the universal solution to all sorts of problems. In line with this dominant viewpoint there has been a proliferation of whistleblower initiatives in recent years. A newly established Dutch initiative is Publeaks. Launched by a large number of Dutch media outlets and aimed at protecting whistleblowers, shedding light on wrongdoings and encouraging investigative journalism, Publeaks is a website ‘for people to leak documents to the media securely and anonymously’. In this opinionated article the authors propose three arguments against this particular form of whistleblowing: the protection against unfunded accusations, the negative side effects of ‘scandal overkill’, and the value of non-transparency.