WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: Our next leak will expose secrets of a major financial institution
Monday, November 29th 2010, 9:30 PM
After spilling information on everything from the love life of a dictator to top state secrets, WikiLeaks has a new target: a major U.S. financial firm.
In an interview with Forbes published on Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the site would release tens of thousands of documents in early 2011 that he claimed would be comparable to the Enron trial.
"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," he promised.
Assange confirmed to Forbes that the upcoming leaks were about a U.S.-based financial institution, but refused to give any more detail about which bank it was.
While WikiLeaks made its name on publishing secret military and government documents, Assange says he has a huge amount of documents revealing private sector secrets too – in fact, he told Forbes, 50 percent of "whistleblower" submissions he has received are non-governmental documents.
The WikiLeaks founder warns that the next batch of documents he'll release will reveal flagrant violations, unethical practices and internal executive decision making structures.
"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he told Forbes.
In the near future, Assange said Wikileaks may be focusing its efforts on exposing secrets about finance and the private sector, including banks across the world and other major companies.
"We have a lot of finance related things," he said. "Of the commercial sectors we've covered, finance is the most significant."
Assange justified the future havoc he will wreak with his philosophy that leaking the information will mean good business for people who embrace ethical business practices and treat their employees well. After all, according to him, happy employees don't leak documents that will hurt their employer.
"Let's say you want to run a good company," he said. "It's nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they're not screwing other people over."
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