Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Dear Wikileaks: Leak the Bank Records NOW, Or Forever Hold Your Peace
Wikileaks head Julian Assange told Forbes that the next leak will be regarding a major American bank. He said that Wikileaks plans to release the documents early next year.
Assange told Computer World in October 2009:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB 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."
Indeed, speculation that the leak could be about Bank of America is going viral, being reported by CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Huffington Post and elsewhere.
As Joe Weisenthal writes today: "Bank Of America Selling Accelerates, As Fears Spread That It's In The Wikileaks Crosshairs". The Associated Press soon picked up on the same story.
(Bank of America is the largest U.S. bank.)
But the Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe of Wiklileaks, Assange may face espionage charges, representative Peter King is asking that Wikileaks be designated a foreign terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, some have called for Assange's assassination (and see this and this), and Wikileaks' website is under attack by hackers. And Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Assange on rape charges.
Unless Wikileaks quickly moves up the release of the bank documents, it may be shut down before it has the chance to organize them so that they are easy to search.
Wikileaks could, of course, leak the raw documents now "into one giant Zip file", and then - if it is still able to do so - leak the organized version later.
Admittedly, if Wikileaks is really a "clever Psyops front", then the bank release might just be about unsavory - but perfectly legal - shenanigans.
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John Young is one of the original founders of WikiLeaks by the way.
ReplyDeleteAnybody who's ever tried to disclose information quickly learns that it is oftentimes essential to hide your own identity for self-protection. This is not only "characteristic of spies and secret societies" as Young is alleged to have said.
It is also true for insiders, whistleblowers and government informants -- and a protected status I remind you.
Quit blaming the messengers and start concentrating on the message, that's ALL that is important.
2010-08-08: Wikileaks May be a State Department “Honeypot” by Scott Creighton
ReplyDeletehttp://willyloman.wordpress.com/category/wikileaks-cia-honeypot/
2010-08-08: Motive
2010-08-15: Evidence (one part comes from Glenn Greenwald)
2010-10-23: Warmongering Against Iran
It's all conjecture of course. Based on the most recent leaks I don't see how the CIA/DHS stands to gain from this for example:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/wikileaks-cable-reveals-israel-pushing-regime-change-iran/
I'm not convinced one way or the other. I don't know how 99.999% of people could be. Questioning the messenger is not the same as blaming the messenger. We don't even know who the REAL messenger is. That's the nature of an anonymous tip.
As a guard against assassination or arrest, Assange should set things up so that if he doesn't take specific actions known only to him on a daily basis, the "big zip file" will be released automatically. (Then make sure the power players know this.)
ReplyDeleteIt's seeming an awful lot like the first shot fired against Assange would be the opening shot in the larger war between the entrenched interests and the rest of us, something which has been brewing for some time now... but maybe that's just how it seems in the moment.
(should have included this in the previous comment) ... because Assange is clearly working for us, yet our leaders are trying to declare war on him.
ReplyDelete(Do they simply not get it, that he's on our side, or do they think we won't realize this? I'm betting that they think they can use the mainstream media to convince us that he's the enemy. That method has been working pretty well for them lately.)