The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has gained a lot of attention during this election, and has also made people like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning household names.
Now there’s a similar site, called MormonLeaks, designed to be a secure portal for people who want to leak internal documents or information about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The website was recently launched by Ryan McKnight, a Las Vegan who gained national attention in October 2016 after posting a series of inside conversations between senior Mormon church officials on YouTube.
“I never really sought out to be this sort conduit of leaks but I kind of fell backwards into it,” McKnight explained.
McKnight was born into the church and was an active member until he started to discover information about the church's history that he didn't know and did not agree with, particularly facts about the church's founder Joseph Smith and his polygamist marriages.
For McKnight, it wasn't just the fact that Smith had married dozens of women - and at least one was only 14 years old - but also that he was never told that by the church. He found it out much later when he was researching the history of the church on his own.
“I basically came to the conclusion that the church was not what I thought it was," he said, "That then lead me to basically rejecting the unique truth claims that the church makes.”
McKnight became that conduit for information about the church after what some people refer to as the "November Policy" was released in 2015. The policy made it clear that children of same-sex couples could not be baptized into the church until they were 18 years old and they disavow same-sex marriage and cohabitation.
The policy also says that people in same-sex marriages are "apostates."
McKnight first heard about the policy through a Facebook group for former members of the church. He posted some of the language from the policy on an ex-Mormon subgroup on Reddit and the Mormon Stories Facebook page, asking if anyone had heard about it and if it was true.
Because he was one of the first people to ask about the policy, people started contacting him about it and other information about the church.
“About once a month I would get contacted by somebody who either worked for the church or used to work for the church, or currently does and they would tell me various things that they wanted to get out there,” he said.
McKnight said he received one or two interesting items from people that he would sometimes post on Reddit, but in 2016 the videos of church leaders came his way.
“In October of this year, I got contacted by somebody who said they had been sitting on 15 videos for about five or six years and they had been itching for an opportunity to get them out there," he said, "I decided to see if I could do it without compromising their identity because they were breaking a non-disclosure agreement by providing me with these videos.”
Since those vidoes, he has received a lot more calls and emails from people wanting to get information about the church out to the general public.
McKnight set up the site for people to submit the information they have.
“Our message to people is: if you’re an employee of the church and you come across information and your conscience tells you that public would benefit or deserves to be aware of this information and your conscience bothers you enough that you’re willing to try to get it out there," he said, "We just want that person to know that a resource exists for them."
McKnight said he doesn't solicit leaks and doesn't push people to leak any information. In fact, he has told some people who don't seem sure about releasing information to hold off. People who work for the church could get in legal hot water for breaking non-disclosure agreements they signed.
“We simply want to promote transparency within the LDS church, which we feel the church falls short in that category,” he said. “Transparency does not have to be a bad thing. If it is, that’s not my fault.”
McKnight believes the church has an ethical responsibility and possibly a fiduciary responsibility to be open with the people who support it.
"I just want people to be able to make a fully informed decision before they decide to support an organization not just financially but with their time and energy and thoughts,” he said.
He said if people know more about the church and still want to be part of it that is, of course, entirely up to them but at least they will be fully informed.
Ryan McKnight, founder, MormonLeaks