JAMIE DIMON APPROVES TRUMP’S BOOMING ECONOMY (MORE JOBS, MORE MILITARY)

JAMIE DIMON APPROVES OF TRUMP’S BOOMING ECONOMY (MORE JOBS, MORE MILITARY):

U.S. ECONOMY STRONGEST SINCE 2014.

TRUMP’S TRADE WAR YIELDS POSITIVE RESULTS FOR U.S. ECONOMY.

TRUMP KNOWS BUSINESS & BLOWS OFF TRADITIONAL, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE POLITICS.

MEDIA NEEDS TO FAIRLY GIVE THE PRESIDENT CREDIT WHEN IT’S DUE HIM, REGARDLESS OF PARTY.

GOD BLESS AMERICA


Post Sources: CNN, Fox News, 4-Traders, Youtube


***** US economy grows at fastest pace since 2014


The US economy roared into high gear in the spring, growing at the fastest pace in almost four years.
Second-quarter economic growth came in at an annual rate of 4.1%, the government said Friday. That was the best showing since the third quarter of 2014.

By many metrics, the United States economy is in excellent shape: Unemployment is near an 18-year low, factories are seeing more orders, and exports are surging.

Economists are generally predicting slower growth in the second half of the year, as the effects of the tax cut wear off and rising interest rates depress consumer spending.

Already announced tariffs are forecast to be only a slight drag on economic growth, unless more are imposed. And it seems that corporate executives are treading carefully, as surveys of business confidence and hiring expectations begin to flag.

The strong second-quarter growth reflectedlarge increases in orders of durable goods, investment in non-residential construction, exports, intellectual property, and government defense spending.
Weak home construction and increased imports, which subtract from economic growth, took it down a notch.
Growth in the first quarter was revised up slightly, from 2% to 2.2%.

Personal consumption expenditures, a key metric that the Federal Reserve uses to decide whether to raise interest rates, also came in at a very strong 4%, although that may reflect a bounceback from last quarter's 0.5%.

HILLARY CLINTON'S CORONATION PROCEEDS; OBAMA IS HER 2016 RUNNING MATE (BILDERBERG GROUP)

HILLARY CLINTON'S CORONATION PROCEEDS BECAUSE OBAMA IS HER RUNNING MATE (BILDERBERG GROUP):

Sources:  Washington Post, The Young Turks, Infowars, YouTube

In case you've been living somewhere under a rock or don't understand the Democrat party's 2016 Political Strategy, perhaps you did not know that Barack Obama is Hillary Clinton's true running mate.

That's right!

Bernie Sanders is actually Hillary's DEBATE COACH but Obama with his Political GENIUS aptitude is her 2016 running mate.

And who is the BILDERBERG GROUP?

300 wealthiest people on planet Earth who really control the world's biggest Banks and use their powerful, European Influence to control (for the most part) the United States Presidency.

**** How the ‘Obama effect’ helps Hillary Clinton, and hurts Bernie Sanders, with Black voters

Hillary  Clinton has strongly embraced President Obama’s record. Campaigning as the one true defender of the president’s legacy, she mentioned him a whopping 21 times in last week’s Democratic debate, while chastising her opponent, Bernie Sanders, for criticizing the Obama administration.

Defending Barack Obama is a smart strategy for winning Democratic primary voters in general and black votes in particular. It’s an approach that should be all the more effective given the president’s tacit endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy.  And it’s almost certainly an important reason why the first two polls that have been conducted since the New Hampshire primary both show her still carrying nearly three-quarters of African Americans in South Carolina.

Indeed, my forthcoming book explains how the president’s connection to several different people and policies affects both black and white Americans’ opinions.  For whites, Obama’s positions usually divide white racial liberals who think racial inequality is due to structural forces like discrimination from racial conservatives who think race-based inequities are due to deficiencies in black culture.  Racially sympathetic whites become more supportive of the president’s positions; racially resentful whites become more opposed to them.

Barack Obama's political allies and policy positions, meanwhile, often receive significantly stronger support from African Americans than they did before being closely connected to the president. My new book also shows that African Americans—especially those with high levels of racial solidarity—have increasingly identified with Democratic Party in the Obama era.

This same “Obama effect” can be found in both white and black Americans’ opinions of Hillary Clinton.

Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, white racial liberals consistently liked Hillary Clinton more than did white racial conservatives.  However, that pattern was reverse in 2008. Among Democrats, white racial liberals gravitated to Obama, and white racial conservatives to Clinton.

But after Clinton joined the Obama administration, the original pattern reasserted itself, and Clinton once again became significantly more popular with white racial liberals than with racial conservatives.

A very similar pattern characterized African American support for Hillary Clinton.  The Pew Research Center’s table below shows that Clinton’s favorability among blacks declined by over 20 percentage points during the 2008 presidential primary.   Her popularity among African Americans then reached record heights when she was Obama’s secretary of state.

It is not surprising, then, that there is a strong relationship between black support for Hillary Clinton in this year’s Democratic primary and opinions about President Obama.

The graph below is based on polls from both 2008 and 2015-16. The latter are the eight biweekly YouGov/Economist surveys conducted since Joe Biden announced that he would not run for president.  The former is the March 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, another YouGov survey that interviewed over 15,000 respondents.

Black Democrats who rate Obama “very favorably” (almost 80 percent) are about 25 points more likely to say they will vote for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, compared to blacks who only rate Obama “somewhat favorably.”

That is a dramatic turnaround, of course, from the last time she ran for the Democratic nomination.  While there is little change in Clinton support from 2008 to 2016 among African Americans who rate Obama somewhat favorably, blacks who have a very favorable opinion of the president are 65 percentage points more likely to vote for her now than they were eight years ago.

To be sure, there are lots of other factors involved in African Americans’ overwhelming support for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary (see especially Corrine McConnaughy’s informative Monkey Cage post on this subject).

But it appears that her close connection to President Obama is one reason why Bernie Sanders has not made major inroads with black voters in South Carolina despite his strong showings in the Iowa and New Hampshire.

JANET YELLEN Confirmed By Congress As First Female Federal Reserve Chair! Congrats!!

#JanetYELLEN

JANET YELLEN has been Confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the First FEMALE Federal Reserve Chair. CONGRATS!





ARTICLE: "Janet Yellen Will Be A Fed Chair For The Real, Every-Day Economy"


Janet Yellen, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, was confirmed Monday by the Senate to succeed chairman Ben Bernanke as the next head of America’s central bank. Her term, which begins February 1st, will mark an important shift in the direction of the bank’s policy efforts, as it begins to “taper” back the last five years of unconventional monetary policy, which have resulted in the Fed pouring some $3.8 trillion into the U.S. economy following the financial crisis.

While Yellen’s appointment marks continuity with the Bernanke era, and with the Fed’s policy of “quantitative easing” of which she was one of the chief architects, it also heralds a number of firsts. Yellen is the first woman to head the central bank, but even more important, she’s also its first openly reform-minded, Keynesian-oriented leader. A stellar academic economist and 36-year Fed veteran with a particular focus on the human impact of unemployment, Yellen has said on many occasions that the last five years of crisis, joblessness and slower growth, “aren’t just statistics to me.”

While former Fed colleagues like Donald Kohn, Alan Blinder, and Larry Meyer cite her as among the most data-driven and analytical economists around, she’s also someone who’s more interested in clear, well articulated ideas with real world impact than creating the cleverest mathematical models. That commitment was partly inspired by her Yale mentor, the legendary liberal economist James Tobin, who argued that the first priority of economics was to improve the lives of real people.

You can bet that Yellen will be keeping that in mind as she slowly and carefully continues the paring back of quantitative easing that began in December. The challenge will be to keep both the markets and the economy steady as the central bank exits from the largest bout of unconventional monetary policy in history. While the Fed’s dual mandate of keeping inflation and unemployment low will be her first task, there’s currently no conflict there, since inflation is running far below the 2 % target that Yellen herself crafted, meaning that tapering doesn’t need to be rushed. She’ll also have her eye on banking reform. Blinder, who was the Fed vice chair back in the 1990s when Yellen was a governor, remembers speaking with her “many times about how the Fed was being too lax on regulation.” And since then he adds, “things have only gotten worse.”

To do all that, she’ll need to build consensus among a group of Federal Reserve governors who are increasingly independent. Fortunately, says Kohn, who worked with her as a Fed staffer in the mid 1990s, “Janet brings a CEO-type skill set to this job.” He and many others say she’s a “listener and a questioner” who likes to surround herself with the smartest people possible, hear out their arguments, challenge them on any weaknesses, then take her own decisions.

It’s a managerial strategy that seems to have worked, as Yellen has the best track record on policy predictions of any Fed leader since 2009. While she’s often characterized as the “nicest” big name economist around, no one should mistake that for a lack of spine. “She can get at the strengths and weaknesses of someone’s arguments so quickly,” says Berkeley professor and Haas School of Business colleague James Wilcox, “but so politely. She’s got that iron fist in a velvet glove quality.” It’s a quality that will likely serve her well as she steers the most important institute in America today towards a new era of monetary policy.


Sources: Bloomberg News, TIME, UCBerkley, Youtube

Bernanke Warns Banks Of Another Pending Recession: More Middle Class Decline

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently warned Bank Chiefs to hold onto to their Profits. Translation: U.S. is headed for another Recession.





Fed proposal would boost bank safety cushions

The Federal Reserve on Thursday proposed tough new rules to require banks to hold even more in reserves as a capital buffer to better withstand future financial crises.

Wall Street has been watching the rulemaking on capital buffers closely. Requirements about capital cushions can directly impact banks' ability to lend, make financial bets and profit off those loans or bets.

Tougher capital cushions are also a key step toward making banks safer and avoiding future taxpayer bailouts.

"Pre-crisis capital requirements were too low in general," said Federal Board Reserve Board governor Daniel Tarullo at a meeting Thursday.

The rules would require banks to keep 7% of risk-weighted assets -- the loans banks make judged by the degree of risk involved -- aside. Banks would have until 2019 to meet the new rules.

For 20 banks with more than $250 billion in total assets, the rules would be a little tougher -- 3% of all assets, including "off-balance sheet exposures" such as derivatives, would have to be kept off limits as a leverage ratio.

The provision would affect all the major megabanks, including JP Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) and Citibank (C, Fortune 500), among others.

Derivatives are the risky bets that helped lead to the financial crisis of 2008.

The new rules are drawn from a 2010 deal negotiated with foreign nations, part of the so-called Basel III accords, requiring all banks to put more capital aside for emergencies.

Capital cushions have come under scrutiny again, in light of revelations that JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion in bad bets made earlier this year and disclosed last month.

"This should improve the overall resiliency of the banking system," according to a memo on the new capital cushion rules released by the Fed.

Additionally, the Fed released new details on what qualifies as capital -- guidelines that are tougher than current standards -- the central bank notes.

Federal Reserve staff said that roughly 80% of banks already meet the tougher buffer of 7% of risk-weighted assets. They calculated that $3.6 billion would need to be raised to meet the new criteria.

The proposed rule will be voted on by the Federal Reserve Board and then faces 90 days of public comment.

Then the Fed and other federal regulatory agencies would officially approve it later this year. The rules would be phased in starting in January 2013.

During a Senate Banking Committee hearing Wednesday, bank regulators said that all U.S. banks were safer than they were three years ago.

JPMorgan Chase has a capital cushion of $101 billion, compared to $1.8 trillion in assets, said its regulator, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry. That's about 5.6% of all assets.
But JPMorgan will likely have to set even more capital aside under the new rules.

That's because the proposed rules do not address an additional and controversial capital cushion that the largest U.S. banks may also have to meet.

That rule could raise the required buffer at some banks from the new standard of 7% to as high as 9.5% of risk-weighted assets.

The Federal Reserve is expected to tackle that issue later.


Sources: CNBC, CNN

Jim Yong Kim Tapped By Pres. Obama To Lead World Bank; Fighting Global Poverty

College President Is Obama’s Pick for World Bank Chief

The White House on Friday named Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank.
That makes Dr. Kim the front-runner to take the helm of the multinational development institution on June 30, when its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term. Tradition has held that Washington selects the head of the World Bank and Europe the leader of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, since they were founded during World War II.

Dr. Kim’s name was not among those widely bandied about since Mr. Zoellick announced his plans to move on last month. Highly respected among aid experts, Dr. Kim is an anthropologist and a physician who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides health care for the poor, and a former director of the department of H.I.V./AIDS at the World Health Organization.

“The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed,” President Obama said Friday. “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”

In a statement, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary and an alumnus of Dartmouth, praised Dr. Kim: “Development is his lifetime commitment, and it is his passion. And in a world with so much potential to improve living standards, we have a unique opportunity to harness that passion and experience at the helm of the World Bank.”

Dr. Kim, who was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959 and moved with his family to the United States when he was 5. He graduated from Brown University in 1982, earned an M.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and received a Ph.D. in anthropology there in 1993.

He was the first Asian-American to head an Ivy League institution when he took the Dartmouth post in 2009.

While working with Partners in Health in Lima, Peru, in the mid-1990s, Dr. Kim helped to develop a treatment program for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the first large-scale treatment of that disease in a poor country. Treatment programs for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are now in place in more than 40 nations, according to Dr. Kim’s biography on Dartmouth’s Web site. He also spearheaded the successful effort to reduce the price of the drugs used to treat this form of tuberculosis.

“Jim is all about delivery and about delivering on promises often made but too seldom kept,” said Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, in an e-mailed statement. “I can think of no one more able to help families, communities and entire nations break out of poverty.”

During his short tenure at Dartmouth, Dr. Kim won a reputation as a level-headed technocrat who frequently encouraged students to think globally.

“Most every college president has to get up and say it’s important to go off and change the world,” said Jonathan S. Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth. “But there aren’t many college presidents who’ve gone out and have changed the world.”

Dr. Kim’s ascension to the head of the World Bank is not a sure thing. But the United States supported the candidacy of Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister, to head the International Monetary Fund last year, presumably assuring that Europe would support Dr. Kim’s nomination.

In recent years, major emerging economies have criticized the decades-old gentlemen’s agreement giving the United States control of the World Bank’s presidency. The Group of 20 countries has called for a fairer, more transparent selection process for the top posts at the World Bank and the I.M.F., and the World Bank itself has reaffirmed its commitment to an open and merit-based process.

“We are trying to ensure that we start having a process whereby we can choose the most qualified person, regardless of nationality,” said Amar Bhattacharya, the director of the Group of 24, an umbrella group of developing countries. “The struggle is about the credibility of the process as much as it is about who wins.”

Dr. Kim, as an American, will not escape some of that criticism. But his background working in poorer countries may partly insulate him, and Mr. Obama was reportedly drawn to him in part because of his work fighting tuberculosis and AIDS.

In addition, powerful emerging market countries, like Brazil and China, failed to rally around a single, viable candidate since the announcement of Mr. Zoellick’s departure.

Dr. Kim is not the only candidate for the World Bank job. On Friday, Angola, South Africa and Nigeria put forward Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank official.

José Antonio Ocampo, the former finance minister of Colombia and a United Nations official, is rumored to be another candidate.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, the development economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, had put himself forward for the position and won the support of some developing countries, including Kenya, although the United States was not supporting his candidacy. On Friday, Mr. Sachs withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Dr. Kim.

“Dr. Jim Kim is a superb nominee for the World Bank presidency,” Mr. Sachs said in an e-mailed statement. “I congratulate the administration for nominating a world-class development leader for this position.”

The World Bank will stop accepting nominations at 6 p.m. Eastern time Friday. If there are more than three candidates, the board will name a shortlist soon thereafter. The bank has said it intends to select its new president in the time for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in April.

The bank provided $57.4 billion in support to low-income and middle-income countries last year. Under Mr. Zoellick’s leadership, the bank raised an additional $90 billion for its fund for the world’s poorest. It also opened up huge troves of data to the public to aid research on development and poverty.


Sources: AP, NY Times, Youtube

Mitt Romney vs The Middle Class: His Taxes vs Our Taxes

Taxes: Romney vs The Rest Of Us!

Romney's Tax Rate Is Lower Than Most Middle Class Families.

Romney Pays Very, Very, Very Little In Payroll Taxes (Medicare & Social Security)


How Many Middle Class Citizens Have Tax Shelters/ Tax Havens In The Cayman Islands Or In Europe?

Romney's Proposed Tax Plan Would Result In A Tax Hike For More Than 40% Of Middle Class Families With Children.

Romney's Proposed Tax Plan Would Save Him Millions Of Dollars Each Year!


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Sources: Think Progress, Youtube, Google Maps

Banks Lose Debit Card Fee Battle! Obama's Law Wins!

Banks Defeated in Senate Vote Over Debit Card Fees

The Senate refused to delay new rules that would sharply cut the fees that banks can charge retailers to process debit card transactions.

The debit card rules were a major part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law passed last year. The Senate vote on Wednesday afternoon was the first major challenge to the new law.

Although 54 senators voted in favor of the delay, the measure, which was sponsored by Senator Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who is facing a tough re-election battle next year, and Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, failed to garner the 60 votes that were required for it to pass under Senate rules. Forty-five senators voted against the measure.

Even with the defeat, the vote represented a remarkable come-from-behind lobbying campaign by banks to recover from the drubbing they took during the anti-Wall Street atmosphere that prevailed last year. The debit card measure, sponsored by Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, passed last year by a two-to-one ratio after little debate and no hearings.

The Wednesday vote, which followed a vigorous floor debate, was a victory for retailers, who have complained that banks and the companies that control the largest debit card networks, Visa and MasterCard, have consistently raised the fees on debit card transactions even as the market has grown rapidly and technology costs have declined.

Those fees topped $20 billion last year, according to industry reports.

The Federal Reserve, as guided by the new law, had proposed rules that would cut the average debit card processing fee to 7 to 12 cents per transaction, from 44 cents currently. Though Congress exempted small banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the new limits, banking regulators warned that such a two-tiered fee system among banks would not be competitive. Opponents of the delay said that all but 100 banks and three credit unions would be exempt from the fee restrictions.

The new regulations are scheduled to take effect by July 21, and the Federal Reserve, which received more than 11,000 comments on its proposals, has said that it intends to meet the deadline.

The vote also provided a victory for Senator Durbin. Mr. Durbin, who sponsored the original measure to roll back the fees that banks are able to charge on debit transactions, was opposed in the effort by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, whose constituency includes Wall Street and major banks.

Mr. Durbin said that a delay of the debit rules would have kept fees at current levels and given banks “a windfall of profit that they do not deserve.”

By coming close to victory, banks are likely to be emboldened to fight other regulations being drawn up under the Dodd-Frank bill. Those include rules that would subject derivatives to increased margin requirements and force derivative trades through a central exchange. Bankers and business lobbies are also opposed to the structure of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is scheduled to take over regulation of mortgages and other consumer-related areas from other banking regulators.

“This shows the banking industry has mounted a very effective fight,” Bill Allison, editorial director for the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, which monitors lobbying activity, said in an interview.

Both sides sought to portray the fight as pitting big, well-financed interests against small-town retailers or banks. Bank lobbyists said that the rule would most harm small community banks and credit unions, while benefitting giant retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot that account for most of the nation’s debit card transactions.

Similarly, a coalition of retailers framed the debate as the giant banks that issue the most debit cards — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — against mom-and-pop retailers who were trying to scrape by on meager profit margins.

There were elements of truth to both arguments. Home Depot executives, for example, told financial analysts on a conference call this year that a cap on debit fees could save the company $35 million a year.

Banks, in a flurry of ads in subway cars and on television, portrayed the debit fee reduction as a $12 billion gift to retailers. “Bureaucrats want to take away your debit card!” read a print ad that tried to argue that the fee cuts would make debit cards so unprofitable that smaller banks and credit unions would either charge for debit cards or raise fees on checking accounts or other consumer services to make up the loss.

Similarly, independent business owners testified before Congress that debit fees had raised their costs.



The Federal Reserve had already missed an April deadline to complete the debit card rules, and lobbyists on both sides of the issue said that Fed officials expressed a desire for Congress to take the issue out of their hands.

Though the major card companies said they would work to put a system in place that allowed for two tiers of charges — one for big banks subject to the limits and another for smaller banks that were exempt — the top banking regulators at the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation each expressed doubts that such a system would work, because market forces would guide transactions to the lower-cost option.

“It’s going to affect the revenues of the small issuers,” Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a Senate committee earlier this year, “and it could result in some smaller banks being less profitable or even failing.”

The Sunlight Foundation said in an April report that 24 lobbying firms had been hired last year to influence action on the debit card rules. Eighteen of those firms were registered as representatives of the two major debit card networks, Visa and MasterCard. A large portion of those lobbyists have gone through the revolving door between government and industry: 68 of the 79 people who registered as lobbyists for Visa or MasterCard previously worked in government, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

Among the heavy-hitters who worked to influence votes on the debit card measure were Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader and a Democrat, who represented Visa. The retailers had Don Nickles, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma, in their corner.


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Sources: NY Times, PBS, Youtube, Google Maps

Eric Holder Goes After Julian Assange (Again): Vows "Significant Action"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Holder: "Significant Actions" Taken In WikiLeaks Investigation


U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized "significant" actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables.

"National security of the United States has been put at risk," Holder said. "The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can."

His comments came as a Swiss bank announced that it had closed the account of Julian Assange, the website's founder, dealing a second financial blow to the site in a matter of days.

"It was revealed that Assange provided false information regarding his place of residence when opening the account," Swiss PostFinance said in a news release announcing the decision.



Meanwhile, Swedish prosecutors said Monday that they have sent additional information to British authorities amid signs that an arrest of Assange may be imminent.

WikiLeaks said on its Twitter page Monday that British authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Assange, but the website soon backed off that statement and said only that the British had received a warrant. Several officials in Britain declined to comment.

Assange, 39, is wanted by Swedish authorities for sex-crime allegations that are not related to WikiLeaks' recent disclosure of secret U.S. documents.

Assange, who has said he has long feared retribution for his website's disclosures, has denied the rape allegations, calling them a smear campaign.

In Washington, Holder declined to answer questions Monday about the possibility that the U.S. government could shut down WikiLeaks, saying he does not want to talk about capabilities and techniques at the government's disposal.

"I authorized just last week a number of things to be done so that we can, hopefully, get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable as they should be," he said.

He declined to comment when asked whether the actions involved search warrants, requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes wiretaps or other means, describing them only as "significant."

Holder did, however, note the government is not limited by the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibits interference of military operations.

"That is not the only tool we have to use in the investigation of this matter," he said. "People would be misimpressioned if they think the only thing we are looking at is the Espionage Act."

Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange last month, saying he is suspected of rape, sexual molestation and illegal use of force. The warrant was followed last week by a "Red Notice" from Interpol, placing Assange on a list of wanted suspects at the request of Sweden's Stockholm Criminal Court.

British police then asked Swedish authorities for additional details not specified in the initial arrest warrant, a possible indication that the location of the elusive Assange is known.

CNN has not confirmed that Assange is in the United Kingdom.

Swedish prosecutors said Monday that they had sent the additional information the British requested. They said the case was being handled by legal authorities in accordance with European laws.



Meanwhile, the website was imploring supporters to donate in other ways to keep WikiLeaks active in the wake of financial losses and denial of service attacks on its servers.

Swiss PostFinance's decided to end "its business relationship" with Assange based on a "technicality," WikiLeaks said in a press release.

The bank said Assange listed Geneva, Switzerland, as his home and "upon inspection, this information was found to be incorrect."

"Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance," the bank said.

WikiLeaks' statement said Assange used his lawyer's address in Geneva for bank correspondence.

The account closure, coupled with PayPal cutting off the site's online donation account late last week, has resulted in losses of 100,000 euros (U.S. $133,000) in assets, the website said.

WikiLeaks, which facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information, began publishing last week what it says are 250,000 U.S. State Department documents that were never meant for public view.

Since then, the site has been hit with denial-of-service attacks, which seek to make a website unavailable. It also has been kicked off servers in the United States and France.



On Sunday, WikiLeaks appealed to supporters worldwide to mirror its website, saying the site "is under heavy attack. In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet, we need your help."

WikiLeaks tweeted Monday that the appeal has helped spawn several hundred mirror sites, even as the website said it continued to come under attack -- this time on its servers in Sweden.



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Sources: CNN, Fox News, Guardian.co.uk, Meet The Press, MSNBC, Sunday Times, Youtube, Google Maps

America's Debt Crisis Worsens While Europe Progresses: "Black Swan"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Europe Making More Progress On Debt Than US: Black Swan


Europe is ahead of the United States in its debt crisis in that it at least has identified the problem and is taking steps to correct it, "Black Swan" author Nassim Taleb told CNBC.

The two regions differ in that the US instead has chosen to bail out institutions, which Taleb, promoting his latest book "The Bed of Procrustes," said is immoral.

"At least we know that we need austerity there. People can't spend money they don't have," he said. "They're ahead of us in that they have identified the problem further. We over here still don't know that we're living on borrowed money and we're borrowing more."

Taleb spoke as global policy makers are working through a plan to help troubled countries such as Ireland, Portugal and Italy deal with their sovereign debt issues. The debt problems have caused wide swings in the stock market as investors try to get a handle on where the crisis is heading.

The US, meanwhile, is working on a far-reaching plan to cut U.S. deficits and slow the growth of long-term debt. The plan, announced earlier this week by a commission appointed by President Obama, gained crucial support from two key Republican senators on Thursday but remained short of votes needed to trigger congressional action.

Taleb rose to prominence with this 2007 book in which he cautioned against excessive risk-taking. The title arose from the discovery of black swans that were thought not to exist, and the philosophy espoused in the book cautions investors that such unpredicted events have the greatest consequences.

In his latest piece, he takes Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to task for engineering the bailouts of institutions that got into trouble through excessive risk.

Whether the gamble turned out to work in the end is immaterial, Taleb said. The larger point is moral hazard—that Bernanke used the money of innocent taxpayers and investors to rescue those who jeopardized the system in the first place.

"He's trying to bail out those who made mistakes with retirees' money," Taleb said. "We have a subsidy...of those who made a mistake, taking money away from those who are innocent. To me that is immoral...it's beyond unwise.

He advocated austerity measures such as program cuts undertaken during the Ronald Reagan presidency, reasoning that Americans would willingly accept "the pill knowing it's the remedy."

As for those on Wall Street and in Washington who caused the financial crisis, he recommended stiff retribution.

"You need to go after people promoting risk management methods that don't work, that help hide risk and at the same time have no downside," Taleb said. "The best way to get rid of the problem is the captain goes down with the ship—every captain, every ship."


Sources: CNBC, MSNBC

Bank Of America Prepares For Assange's Wikileaks Attack

Bank of America Executive: We're Preparing For Wikileaks


A senior Bank of America executive Wednesday suggested the company is prepared to deal with a possible release of internal documents by WikiLeaks in part because the bank has been through similar public disclosures before.

Anne Finucane, head of global strategy and marketing for Charlotte-based Bank of America, said in a speech in Boston that the company has already endured grueling government investigations that resulted in the public release of executives' e-mails and other internal documents.

"I don't think there's a company that has had more leaks, more of our information provided to congressional hearings, attorneys general ... etc.," said Finucane, referring to investigations by Congress and regulators over its controversial acquisition of failing investment bank Merrill Lynch in January 2009.

"We have been out there pretty much 24-7, whether those of us who run communications like it or not, and we have learned not only to react, but deal with this as a given," she added.

Among the material that came out during a congressional investigation of Bank of America's Merrill acquisition was an e-mail one bank director wrote to another director about the company's decision to slash its dividend: "Unfortunately, it's screw the shareholders!!" Another note by the same director suggested the company was forced by the government to complete the Merrill deal.

In February, Bank of America agreed to settle a separate investigation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it failed to properly disclose to investors the size of losses at Merrill Lynch, as well as bonuses Merrill employees would be receiving. The company agreed to pay $150 million and strengthen its corporate governance and disclosure practices.

Finucane spoke Wednesday before a women's networking breakfast sponsored by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. She made only a fleeting reference to the brewing controversy with WikiLeaks and spoke mainly about how Bank of America tried to respond to the financial crisis, as well as of her own career path to one of the top jobs in the nation's largest bank.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes magazine last month that the nonprofit group, which released a huge cache of sensitive U.S. diplomatic correspondence this week, plans to release thousands of documents from a major U.S. bank early next year, spurring speculation that Bank of America could be the target.

Assange did not identify the bank. But in a separate interview 13 months ago, Assange told Computerworld magazine that his organization had obtained a five-gigabyte hard drive from an unidentified Bank of America executive. Still, Bank of America said it has no contact with WikiLeaks and is unable to verify the assertion that WikiLeaks has an employee's hard drive.

"We can assume it's us, but we don't know it's us, because we've had no further evidence beyond what we have read and heard," Finucane said.

Finucane is the only member of Bank of America's senior executive committee based in Boston. Chief executive Brian Moynihan lives in Massachusetts, but is officially based in Charlotte.

Finucane's responsibilities include overseeing Bank of America's vast philanthropic efforts. In her speech Wednesday, she said Bank of America has several priorities for its charitable giving: economic development, cultural institutions, and social services. For instance, Finucane noted the bank recently donated $10 million to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which just opened a new wing to public acclaim.

Overall, Bank of America has said it plans to give away about $12 million by the end of this year to nonprofit organizations and other groups in Massachusetts, up from $9 million a year six years ago when it acquired FleetBoston, then New England's largest bank.

"Happily, we have been able to increase our community relations and philanthropy over the last several years," Finucane said.






Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal


First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government.

Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.


Read on....“WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets”.


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Sources: Boston.com, CNBC, Emirates247, Forbes.com, Life.com, McClatchy Newspapers, Young Turks, WCNC, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Assange Vows To Expose A Major U.S. Bank Next Year: Forbes Interview

Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal


First WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.

“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 told me.


Read Forbes’ full interview with Assange and our cover story on what he and WikiLeaks means for business here.


“You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” Assange added. “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.”

WikiLeaks recent priority has clearly been the publication of hundreds of thousands of government documents: 76,000 classified documents from the war in Afghanistan, another 392,000 from Iraq, and on Sunday, the first piece of an ongoing exposure of what will likely be millions of diplomatic messages sent between the U.S. State Department and its embassies.

But that government focus doesn’t mean WikiLeaks won’t embarass corporations, too. Since October, WikiLeaks has closed its submissions channel; Assange says the site was receiving more documents than it could find resources to publish. And half those unpublished submissions, Assange says, relate to the private sector. He confirmed that WikiLeaks has damaging, unpublished material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms (aside from the upcoming bank release), and energy companies, just to name a few industries.

Whether and when those secrets come out is solely a matter of Assange’s discretion. “We’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.”





WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets


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.

(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)

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.”

This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control freak. He pauses to think—a process that occasionally puts our conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old Wiki­Leaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he’s “being tracked.”

“These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them,” he says, then pauses again.

“Megaleaks?” I suggest, trying to move things along.

“Yes, that’s good—megaleaks.” His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him impersonate IT staff to trick companies’ employees into revealing their passwords over the phone, and today it’s deeper still after a recent bout of flu. “These megaleaks . . . they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase.”

He’ll see to that. 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.

Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.

Long gone are the days when Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy thousands of Vietnam War documents to leak the Pentagon Papers. Modern whistleblowers, or employees with a grudge, can zip up their troves of incriminating documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sites—or simply submit them directly to WikiLeaks.

What do large companies think of the threat? If they’re terrified, they’re not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks “is high profile, legally ­insulated and transnational,” says former Commerce Department official James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “That adds up to a reputational risk that companies didn’t have to think about a year ago.”

Already U.S. laws wrapped into financial reform this year expand whistleblower incentives to offer six- and seven-digit rewards to staffers in any industry who report malfeasance. Wiki­Leaks adds another, new form of corporate data breach: It offers the conscience-stricken and vindictive alike a chance to publish documents largely unfiltered, without censors or personal repercussions, thanks to privacy and encryption technologies that make anonymity easier than ever before.

Wiki­Leaks’ technical and ideological example has inspired copycats from Africa to China and rallied transparency advocates to push for a new, legal promised land in the unlikely haven of Iceland. It’s also fueling a race in the cyber­security industry and in Washington to find technology that can plug information leaks once for all.

Today Assange looks tired, his eyes narrowed and the skin beneath them puffy, as if he’s unused to even England’s gloomy daylight. He has no permanent home. “We’re like a traveling production company; everyone moves somewhere, and we put on a production,” he sighs. “We haven’t had any rest since April.”

In Sweden, where many of the group’s servers are based, a warrant has now been issued for his arrest on rape charges. He’s denied the accusations, arguing they amount to smear tactics. He’s also afraid to set foot in several other countries, including the U.S., fearing that officials will find reasons to detain him. No question that Wiki­Leaks would be in trouble if he were jailed: A spokeswoman says it has a “contingency plan,” but without Assange there is no public face. Meanwhile, his resources have been drained by defections from his organization; some old friends and associates have taken issue with his autocratic style.

None of which has stopped him from picking new fights. The promised release of bank documents would be the largest assault by WikiLeaks on the corporate sector, and Assange says the business community should expect plenty of sequels. In early October the site shut down its document-submission system; Assange says it was receiving more information than it could find resources to publish, thousands of additions a day at some points. The total is more gigabytes of data than he can count. “Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises,” he says, drawing a curve upward in the air with one 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.

Over the last four years he has been so busy embarrassing various governments, from Washington to the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel arap Moi, that many forget the corporate scandals already on WikiLeaks’ trophy wall. In January 2008 the site posted documents alleging that the Swiss bank Julius Baer hid clients’ profits from even the Swiss government, concealing them in what seemed to be shell companies in the Cayman Islands.

The bank filed a lawsuit against WikiLeaks for publishing data stolen from its clients. Baer later dropped the suit—but managed to stir up embarrassing publicity for itself. The next year WikiLeaks published documents from a pharma trade group implying that its lobbyists were receiving confidential documents from and exerting influence over a World Health Organization project to fund drug research in the developing world. The resulting attention helped crater the WHO project.

In September 2009 commodities giant Trafigura filed an injunction that prevented British media from mentioning a damaging internal report. The memo showed the company had dumped tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, chemicals that allegedly sickened 100,000 locals. But it couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from publishing the information. Trafigura eventually paid more than $200 million in settlements.

How can an American corporation respond to a Wiki attack? Lawsuits won’t work: WikiLeaks is legally shielded in the U.S. by its role as a mere conduit for documents. Even if a company somehow won a judgment against WikiLeaks, that wouldn’t shut it down. Assange spreads the site’s assets over many countries. “There’s no single target to drop a bomb on,” says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

The best protection? With a dash of irony Icelandic Wiki­Leaks staffer Kristinn Hrafnsson suggests that companies change their ways to avoid targeting. “They should resist the temptation to enter into corruption,” he says. Don Tapscott, coauthor of The Naked Corporation (Free Press, 2003), agrees. His simplistic conclusion: “Open your own kimono. You’re going to be naked. So you have to dig deep, look at your whole operation, make sure that integrity is part of your bones.”

Most corporations, instead, are turning to cybersecurity to shield their private parts. Despite dozens of calls to companies in tech, energy and finance, none wanted to talk about antileaking strategies. But a Forrester Research study found that about a quarter of companies in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and Canada were implementing leak-­focused security software in 2010, and another third are considering that option. A study last year by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy-research consultancy in Traverse City, Mich., found that 60% of employees admit to taking sensitive data before they leave a company.

***

SOME OF THE MORE INTRIGUING ANTILEAK work is being done by Uncle Sam. In an unmarked government building on the edge of a residential Arlington, Va. neighborhood, a cybersecurity researcher named Peiter Zatko shows just how easily leaks can occur. He lays out a blow-by-blow history of one insider data theft: The suspect searched broadly over the network to find anything related to critical infrastructure, then returned to manually probe a few interesting files.

“Then he walked away with enough information to shut down big chunks of the telephone systems in the United States,” Zatko says matter-of-factly.

Who was that shadowy data smuggler? “That was me,” says the 39-year-old researcher, giggling bashfully.

Zatko is not your typical Department of Defense employee. Even in his new Beltway digs, he prefers to be called “Mudge,” the hacker handle he used during decades of exploring the dark corners of the Internet. Frank Heidt, a former security staffer at MCI and several military contractors, says that when he first read Zatko’s exploit research in mid-1990s hacker zines, he thought that Mudge must be the pseudonym of a group. “He was so prolific that I thought he couldn’t be one person,” Heidt says. In 1998, as part of the L0pht hacker think tank, Zatko testified in a congressional hearing that he and his friends could shut down the Internet in 30 minutes.

Since March Zatko has also been a lead cybersecurity researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the mad-scientist wing of the Pentagon devoted to projects that occasionally result in breakthroughs like the Internet and GPS. Zatko’s new pet project may be equally ambitious: He aims to rid the world of digital leaks.

The telephone system theft case that Zatko dissected in a Darpa conference room was a test, demonstrating that anyone with access to a network could steal data without detection, despite the system’s expensive security software. Now his challenge is to fix the problem. Since August he has led a project known as the Cyber Insider Threat, or Cinder.

Like most Darpa initiatives it’s an X-Prize-style open invitation for ideas; recipients typically get tens of millions of dollars in government funding. Thirty-five entrants, mostly tiny companies, have already publicly signed up, many more in secret. “We’re looking to everyone from academia to startups to large government contractors,” says Zatko. “We’re not looking for evolutionary improvement. We want to pull the rug out from the problem altogether.”

It’s a well-worn carpet. Since late 2007 every major security software vendor, from McAfee to Symantec to Trend Micro, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire companies in the so-called Data-Leak Prevention (DLP) industry—software designed to locate and tag sensitive information, and then guard against its escape at the edges of a firm’s network.

The problem: DLP doesn’t work. Data is simply created too quickly, and moved around too often, for a mere filter to catch it, says Richard Stiennon, an analyst for security consultancy IT-Harvest, in Birmingham, Mich. “For DLP to function, all the stars have to align,” he says. “This is a huge problem that can’t be stopped with a single layer of infrastructure.”

More fashionable now is network forensics: the process of constantly collecting every fingerprint on a company’s servers to trace an intruder or leaker after the fact—and, perhaps, deter the next one. That’s a bit like fighting the next war according to the last one. Still, revenue at NetWitness, a prominent Herndon, Va. startup in that budding field, has leaped from $250,000 to $40 million since 2006. While the software generally gathers data and makes it easily available to queries, it doesn’t pinpoint culprits. “There’s nothing in current technology that can do this in an automated fashion,” says Shawn Carpenter, principal forensics analyst at Net­Witness. “You need a Columbo.”

Or, better yet, a robo-Columbo. Darpa’s Zatko has been working on a system of automatically identifying what he calls “malicious missions”: insider activity aimed at stealing data from inside a company’s firewall, whether it’s a Dell PC remotely hijacked by a Chinese cyberspy or Bradley Mannings, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified documents about combat in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Zatko’s system would monitor networks in real-time for just the sort of data-stealing behavior he would perform himself: steps like scouring large areas of the network for a certain file, dumping piles of data to external storage hardware or sending encrypted files out over the Internet.

No single episode would signal a leak; instead, the software would link acts in a probabilistic chain, triggering an alert only if a string of events points to purposeful data theft.

Some of that leaky behavior isn’t what a casual observer might expect. Consider the cyber footprints left by Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison for selling intelligence to the Soviets over two decades. Every few days Hanssen would stop his normal activities and make a single query to a server across the network, a pattern he repeated for years. That server, Zatko says, held the counterintelligence database. Hanssen was searching for himself, a routine check to see if he’d finally been found out.

“You put all these things together into the different components of the mission,” says Zatko. “I’m looking for these new rhythms, new tells, new interrelations and requirements.”

Cinder wasn’t created to combat WikiLeaks—in fact, it predates WikiLeaks’ biggest military scandals. But Zatko has nonetheless found himself squarely in opposition to Assange’s mission—a strange face-off, given that the two men once traveled in the same hacker circles, during the years when Assange went by the hacker handle Mendax (a Latin reference to the “splendidly deceptive” in the poet Horace’s Odes) and reveled in accessing corporate and government systems without authorization. Neither will reveal much about their past encounters, but Assange says that they “were in the same milieu.” Asked about Assange, Zatko says only, “I have very pleasant memories of those old days.”

WikiLeaks’ founder, in fact, seems to have trouble accepting that Mudge is working for the other side. “He’s a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical,” says Assange. “I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.” He dismisses Cinder as just another system of digital censorship. And those systems, he says, will always fail, just as China’s Great Firewall can’t stop well-informed and determined dissident Internet users. “Censorship might work for the average person but not for highly motivated people,” Assange says. “And our people are highly motivated.”

***

SHUTTING DOWN WIKILEAKS WOULDN’T STOP the growing movement of transparency agitators. They now have a nation-size ally: Iceland. Since WikiLeaks scored a major scoop unearthing the corrupt loans that helped destroy that country’s largest bank, the volcanic island is fast on its way to becoming the conduit for a global flood of leaks.

It began when Kaupthing Bank collapsed in October 2008—a calamitous chain reaction that has strapped Iceland with $128 billion in debts, around $400,000 per capita. Ten months later Bogi Agustsson, a Walter Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on the evening news and explained that a legal injunction had prevented the station from airing a prepared exposé on Kaupthing. Viewers who wanted to see the material, he suggested, should visit a site called Wikileaks.org.

Those who took Agustsson’s advice found a summary of Kaupthing’s loan book posted on the site, detailing more than $6 billion funneled from Kaupthing’s coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, often with little or no collateral; $900 million went to Olafur Olafsson, a major investor in Kaupthing who, on his birthday, flew in Elton John from England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert. “The banks had been eaten from the inside out,” says Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former investigative reporter in Reykjavik who now works with WikiLeaks.

A government investigation is still going on; no criminal charges have been filed. But WikiLeaks became a household name in Iceland. In December 2009 Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who then worked with Wiki­Leaks, were invited to keynote a free-speech conference in Reykjavik.

Their talk echoed an idea from American cyber­libertarian John Perry Barlow, calling for a “Switzerland of bits.” Iceland, with its independent spirit and recent taste of explosive whistle-blowing, they suggested, could become the digital doppelgänger of a tax haven: a safe harbor for transparency, where it’s open season on government and business secrets—and leakers are protected by law.

The idea might have gone nowhere if not for Birgitta Jonsdottir. Assange’s message captivated the 43-year-old poet and self-styled “realist-anarchist.” She wasn’t just another idealistic protester with a goth wardrobe and hipster haircut. In the chaotic political environment that followed the national financial crisis, Jonsdottir had been elected to Iceland’s parliament, the Althingi, in April 2009.

Working with the country’s transparency activists, she pulled together the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi. They would also make Iceland the most friendly legal base for whistleblowers on Earth.

Velkomin, as Icelanders would say, to Leakistan.

“The more that companies resist, the more information will get out about them,” says Jonsdottir when we meet in Reykjavik’s Hressingarskalinn café, around the corner from the parliament building. “They can’t hide anymore. The war is over. They lost.” In Jonsdottir’s vision Iceland will attract both mainstream media and Wiki­Leaks-like organizations to move their data to Iceland, enjoying legal protection, just as another firm might incorporate in a tax-sheltering island in the Caribbean.

She may be getting a bit ahead of herself. Immi has yet to become law, though it has backing from powerful figures, including both Iceland’s minister of justice and the head of its progressive party. Even if it does, Immi likely wouldn’t offer much legal protection to organizations whose assets and staff aren’t physically in the country; they could still be sued anywhere else in the world, given that their digital and print publications could appear globally.

Immi could also face resistance from the U.S. and the EU—particularly when it comes to military matters. As Marc Thiessen, a conservative pundit, wrote on the blog of the American Enterprise Institute in August, “Immi calls into question Iceland’s seriousness as a NATO ally, and Iceland needs to realize there will be consequences for its actions.” There could be a backlash for exposing corporate secrets, too. Alastair Mullis, a professor of law at East Anglia University in Britain, says, “It’s possible that Iceland will become the defamation capital of the world.”

Jonsdottir and fellow Immi creator Smari McCarthy are pushing ahead anyway. Immi, they say, doesn’t fashion new laws; it cherry-picks existing statutes from around the world (source shields from Sweden, libel protection from New York State, protected communications with journalists from Belgium, among them). “We’re basing our legislation on laws that have already withstood attacks,” says Jonsdottir. Defamation and other concerns like child pornography and copyright violations, she argues, would still be illegal in Iceland and wouldn’t be sheltered.

Nor is the idea to protect WikiLeaks itself, Jonsdottir points out. The site doesn’t need help: Its data and submissions process are carefully encrypted, and its infrastructure is spread over enough countries—including some servers in a bombproof, underground bunker in Sweden—that taking it offline is already nearly impossible.
Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and whistleblower outlets that don’t rely on Wiki­Leaks’ technical savvy or resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits—regional sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info—have published damning data. Immi’s McCarthy says he’s been approached by media organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya.

German WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, disgruntled with Assange’s laser focus on infrequent megaleaks, has left the organization along with several others to create his own spinoff. “In the end there must be a thousand WikiLeaks,” he told Der Spiegel in September.

Iceland certainly has the infrastructure for a lot of informational mischief. Half an hour outside Reykjavik, on a landscape that resembles Mars covered in snow, the Thor Data Center is preparing for an influx of bytes. By 2011 it hopes to have thousands of servers in its aluminum-plant-turned-server-farm, powered by ultracheap geothermal energy and cooled by free arctic air.

Iceland’s biggest Web host, ironically named 1984 Web Hosting, is excited about the boost Immi could give its business. “I created this company to prevent thought control,” says Mordur Ingolfsson, its chief executive. “In my humble opinion, Immi is the most important thing to happen to this godforsaken island since the Sagas were written.” (That’s 600-plus years.)

Jonsdottir agrees: “WikiLeaks was an important icebreaker. It was the tip. Immi is the rest of the wedge, and it will open up everything.” (She is less thrilled to learn that Assange speaks of Immi as his personal creation.)I ask Assange how he expects companies to cope with a world where hundreds of WikiLeak-alikes may soon exist. His three-part prescription is earnest—if a bit patronizing: “Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well.”

He also wants to clear up a misunderstanding. Despite his revolutionary reputation, he’s not antibusiness. He bristles at the media’s focus on his teenage years as a computer hacker who broke into dozens of systems, from the Department of Defense to Nortel, and was eventually convicted on 25 charges of computer fraud and fined thousands of dollars.

Instead, he prefers to think of himself as an entrepreneur. He tells the story of a free-speech-focused Internet service provider he cofounded in 1993, known as Suburbia. It was, to hear him tell it, the blueprint for WikiLeaks—in one instance, when the Church of Scientology demanded to know who had posted antichurch information on one site, he refused to help. (“He has titanium balls,” says David Gerard, that site’s creator.) “I saw it early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their information, creating a conduit,” Assange says. “Without having any other robust publisher in the market, people came to us.”

Leaks merely lubricate the free market, he says, settling into the couch and clearly enjoying giving me a lecture on economics. (Later, as a 45-minute interview pushes into two hours, he ignores his handler, who keeps urging him to leave for his next appointment.) He cites the example of the Chinese Sanlu Group, whose milk powder contained toxic melamine in 2008. While poisoning its customers, Sanlu also gained an advantage over competitors and might have forced more of them to taint their products, too, or go bankrupt—if Sanlu hadn’t been exposed in the Chinese press. “In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies,” he says.

Of course, Assange’s tax isn’t as equitable as it sounds. He alone decides where to apply the penalty, choosing the targets and when to expose them with a touch of theatrical grandstanding—and with zero accountability. For better—and worse—WikiLeaks has become the Julian Assange Show. As a photographer begins shooting, Assange wonders aloud if the coat he’s wearing might have been produced by a labor-exploiting company. A few minutes later he jokes about his “messiah complex.”

Like any true believer, Assange sees his work in simple terms. Markets, he reminds me, can’t exist without information. Business will come to appreciate what he offers. And if that requires a few painful scandals in the process?

Assange doesn’t miss a beat. “Pain for the guilty.”





WikiLeaks Claims Next Target Is Big U.S. Banks


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed a fresh "megaleak" will target a Major U.S. bank "early next year," according to an interview published Monday.

Speaking to Forbes magazine, Assange said that he was ready to unleash tens of thousands of documents that could "take down a bank or two."

Comparing the documents to the emails that exposed Enron's dealings amid its collapse, the controversial Australian said an existing "big US bank" was the subject of a pending data dump.

Asked about any future leaks, he said: "Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it."

The interview was conducted in early November, before Sunday's publication of around a quarter of a million leaked United States embassy cables from WikiLeaks that have caused consternation in Washington and capitals around the world.

Assange said the bank leak would "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.

"Usually when you get leaks at this level, it's about one particular case or one particular violation."

Amid the economic crisis a handful of "too big to fail" US banks have come under scrutiny for their dealings, particularly with mortgaged-backed securities that helped fuel the meltdown.

Executives from Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns have been hauled before Congress to explain their bank's actions.

Assange mentioned Goldman Sachs by name in the interview, but did not confirm the Wall Street giant will be the target of the leak.

Goldman has recently agreed a $550 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle fraud charges.

Facing allegations of defrauding investors, the storied investment bank admitted it had made a "mistake" and given "incomplete" information to clients.

Assange said that "about 50 per cent" of the documents that the nonprofit organization holds relate to the corporate world.


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