09:50 AM
The WikiLeak Next Time - BofA?
In a recent interview with Forbes, Assange says the site has plans for a "megaleak" with "either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it." The source is, according to Assange, a "big US bank."
He promises that the pending release "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."
Given his apparent politics -- Assange is against the US war on terror and his document and video dumps have primarily focused on the transgressions of the US government and military -- it's safe to assume that the bank in questions would be Goldman Sachs. Goldmans after all is the Dick Cheney of financial services; respect them or loathe them, the investment firm is in the crosshairs of the critics of the recent credit crisis and capitalism in general.
If a crafty online provocateur were to get pursue maximum exposure for his web site and his politics, there is only one target. No one will get too worked up about sinister memos from Bank of America or TD Ameritrade.
Watch this space.
UPDATE: I may be wrong! According to New York magazine, Assange says he has a ton of material from BofA.
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
This interviews was in 2009 so that means that the info is more than a year old. Does BofA have any burning secrets that could bring down management, new hastily-enacted laws a la Sarbox, or even inspire a movie on HBO like Too Big To Fail?
Stay tuned. Phil Albinus is the former editor-in-chief of Advanced Trading. He has nearly two decades of journalism experience and has been covering financial technology and regulation for nine years. Before joining Advanced Trading, he served as editor of Waters, a monthly trade journal ... View Full Bio