Amid all the hubbub about the current WikiLeaks document dump, I have felt almost alone in my suspicion that something wasn’t right. A Twitter follower noted that I’d used the term “chaff” twice in describing it; for the uninitiated, chaff is what fighter pilots shoot into the sky to confuse radar-homing missiles. Apart from a few interesting pins, these diplomatic cables are really an enormous haystack. Nothing is marked higher than SECRET NOFORN, an intelligence caveat about as exciting as Miller Lite bottles in a bar. Literally every serving member of the military is cleared for that caveat; I’ve worked with higher classifications myself. Late last night a contact currently serving overseas confirmed my suspicions that his personal laptop held far more damaging information than anything in this document dump. So imagine my lack of surprise to read this:
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.”
If I had to guess, I’d say the target is Bank of America, which has a big problem with improper foreclosures as it attempts to process out the bad mortgages it bought in the forced sale of Countrywide Financial. But I am struck by the impression that Assange timed the document dump to accompany this article’s appearance in Forbes:
By the time you’re reading this another giant dump of classified U.S. documents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet. Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his exposés, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency over the last year have included 76,000 secret Afghan war documents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions, the largest classified military security breaches in history, have roused antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon.
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. (Emphasis mine)
I shouldn’t like to dress Assange up as a hero any more than I would want to knock him down. With a rape charge pending in Sweden, his life is already disturbingly similar to the plot of a well-known novel series about dragon tattoos. But most of the released diplomatic cables seem like tabloid journalism, with detailed discussion of foreign potentates and Ukranian nurses; none of them were unavailable to historians with a FOIA request. Assange has certainly saved many document researchers an enormous amount of effort (and hasn’t redacted the material), but he hasn’t done anything exactly Earth-shattering this week, either.
On the other hand:
If even a fraction of his claims are borne out, he’s already sitting on a crypt of data any three-letter spy agency would kill for. The world’s most vocal transparency advocate is now one of the world’s biggest keepers of secrets. And about half of those revelations, says Assange, relate to the private sector. (Emphasis mine)
I hope to hear more about this, and soon.
