Next WikiLeaks leak: Bank of America?
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
The financial world is abuzz with guesses about which bank's secret documents Wikileaks has gotten hold of.
In an interview with Forbes published this week, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange promised to release a trove of documents in early 2011 that "could take down a bank or two." He said the documents will show "flagrant violations" and "unethical practices" at the executive level.
While Assange declined to name names, last year in an interview with Computer World he offered hints at what he has. "At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," Assange said, according to a piece published Oct. 9, 2009.
Here are key excerpts from his Forbes interview:
So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?
Yes, but maybe not as high-impact...I mean, it could take down a bank or two.
That sounds like high impact.
But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.
...
These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven't seen any of those from the private sector.
No, not at the same scale as for the military.
Will we?
Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up -- that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.
Is it a U.S. bank?
Yes, it's a U.S. bank.
One that still exists?
Yes, a big U.S. bank.
The biggest U.S. bank?
No comment.
When will it happen?
Early next year. I won't say more.
What do you want to be the result of this release?
[Pauses] I'm not sure.
It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.
Usually when you get leaks at this level, it's about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there's only one similar example. It's like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that's tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.
You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.
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