The new website will be "a safe haven where people can share information anonymously."

In Iceland, former WikiLeaks member Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old student, said that he and others planned to create an alternative whistle-blower site.

"We broke from WikiLeaks because a few ex-WikiLeaks members had been very unhappy with the way Assange was conducting things," Snorrason told AFP in Reykjavik.

Nonetheless, Snorrason insisted the project was "not a personal attack."

He said the new project will be a "a safe haven where people can share information anonymously," unlike WikiLeaks which dumps documents onto its site.