WikiLeaks has created another firestorm with its latest document dump, this time covering tons of diplomatic files concerning international relations.
Corporate American now needs to brace itself as well – WikiLeaks is gearing up for massive document dumps involving a major US bank, revealing thousands of pages of corporate secrets. More document dumps from other corporations will follow. Forbes reports on the story along with an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “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.”
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Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells. Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.
He jokes with the writer about calling these mega document dumps “megaleaks.”
The most interesting thing is this notion of “involuntary transparency.” In a time when huge corporations are amassing an incredible amount of power, Assange may have found the great equalizer. Corporations are generally amoral, and many of its executives are immoral, so now we the public will get a window into the workings of a company that blows past the carefully crafted public image. Can you imagine the frenzy this will create in the PR department of these companies?
