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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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 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.
The local corporate community is prepared to step up in a big way to help land the 2012 Democratic National Convention, says the leader of one of the area's largest business groups.
Many of the city's most prominent companies have not yet been vocal about their support for the bid, but they are prepared to help raise the dollar amounts -- likely between $50 and $60 million -- needed to bring the Democrat's next presidential nominating convention to St. Louis, said Mike DeCola, head of Mississippi Lime Company and chairman of the Regional Business Council.
"The corporate community has to step up in a number of ways, certainly the fundraising is a big part of that," DeCola said. "We are keenly aware of the dollars we need to put up just to get the convention here."
Individual companies have not been assigned target amounts to raise, DeCola said, though "our members are aware that's coming."
St. Louis is one of four finalists to host the party, which is expected to announce its decision in the next month or so.
DeCola's comments come as St. Louis officials believe the competition is coming down to them and Charlotte, where the effort is being led by an outspoken utility chief, Duke Energy head Jim Rogers, who has led fundraising efforts and even sought to enlist basketball great Michael Jordan, currently owner of the city's NBA franchise, to lobby the White House.
DeCola said just because "we don't have guys that like to beat their chest in the press like that" doesn't mean St. Louis' business community is not serious about helping attract the convention, which will bring thousands of visitors, and perhaps more importantly, lasting civic prestige to the winner.
"The business leaders in this community all know what's involved, and they have all expressed very, very strong support to make this happen," DeCola said. "We have companies that are much bigger, much more globally well-known than Duke Energy."
DeCola was one of several executives who met with a scout team for the Democratic National Committee at a lunch at the Jewel Box while the group made its site visit here over the summer.
The Regional Business Council is made up of medium-sized companies, so-called "mid-caps."
However, any corporate effort to land the convention would likely need participation from the local business heavyweights: companies such as Express Scripts, Monsanto, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and, of course, Anheuser-Busch.
The Brewery has already signaled a support for the bid. In a statement issued Monday, A-B president David Peacock said the city already has a "track record" of hosting major events, such as last year's baseball All-Star game.
"The people here in St. Louis are very accommodating and they put a great face on the city for events of this size," Peacock said "We are excited the DNC is considering St. Louis, and we would be proud to have them here."
Meanwhile, Charlotte's corporate community may actually be a liability for its chances -- the city is home to financial institutions such as Bank of America, which accepted $40 billion in federal bailout money.
A Union representing hotel workers has asked the Democratic National Committee to rule out two of its four convention-site finalists, Cleveland and Charlotte, N.C., because they lack sufficient unionized hotel facilities.
"Among the DNC's four finalist cities, only St. Louis and Minneapolis" have the capacity to "house a large portion of the delegates and other guests ... in unionized hotels," John Wilhelm, president of the international UNITE HERE union of hotel and textile workers, wrote in a letter to DNC Chairman Tim Kaine.
"Therefore, one of those two cities should be the DNC's choice for 2012. Unfortunately, Charlotte and Cleveland do not fit the bill, and they should be removed from the list."
Though the letter was dated Oct. 6, it wasn't publicized until this week, when the union's Minneapolis local, eager to enhance its city's chances, issued a press release on the subject.
"We're just very interested in having the convention here on a number of levels, and for the international it's a priority that it be in a union city," said Wade Luneberg, secretary-treasurer and political director of UNITE HERE Local 17 in Minneapolis. "We think it's important to differentiate between the four [finalist] cities and see that Minneapolis and St. Louis rise to the top."
Charlotte, N.C., has no unionized hotels, and its convention center's employees are not union members, according to Wilhelm's letter. Cleveland has some union hotels, but only a handful in the downtown area and about 10 in the larger region; they belong to a competing union, Workers United.
UNITE HERE under Wilhelm split with former President Bruce Raynor in a bitter and protracted battle that ended last year with Raynor leaving and founding Workers United.
Workers United, which has affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, says it has 150,000 members, while UNITE HERE, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, claims 265,000.
A subcommittee of the DNC visited potential convention sites over the summer to evaluate their logistical suitability and advise the committee on their findings. A decision is expected in late 2010 or early 2011.
Democratic sources familiar with the decision-making process say Charlotte and St. Louis are the current front-runners, with Charlotte at a slight disadvantage because of its small overall hotel room stock.
Political considerations — including last week's election results — are expected to play a major role in the decision-making process. The defeat of a Democratic governor in Ohio may have hurt Cleveland's chances, while Minneapolis could be helped if Minnesota's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Mark Dayton, hangs on to win. He currently leads in the count in a race that is likely to go to a recount.
The Minneapolis area has at least 20 union hotels totaling 5,300 rooms, with more than 2,000 workers, Wilhelm's letter notes. St. Louis, the letter says, has 10 union hotels with more than 3,000 rooms. Both cities' sports arenas and convention centers are unionized as well.
"Employees at union hotels are far more likely than employees in non-union hotels to get the sort of basic fair treatment for which the Democratic Party stands — good wages, affordable health benefits, stable long-term positions, and respect and a voice on the job," Wilhelm wrote. "For these reasons, those employees are more likely to provide delegates and guests with better service as well."
UNITE HERE official Pilar Weiss said the DNC was receptive to the union's concerns. "It's early on," she said. "We're having a dialogue with them."
A spokesman for the DNC, Hari Sevugan, said, "As always, we are looking at a number of factors and will have an announcement in the coming months."
A St. Louis television station is reporting that Charlotte and St. Louis have emerged as finalists in the competition to serve as host of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
KTVI said Tuesday that the two cities have taken the lead over the other cities under consideration, Cleveland and Minneapolis.
Democratic Party officials have said they expect to make a choice later this year.
Both the St. Louis station and Politico.com said the issue of unionized hotels could tilt the competition against Charlotte. Most of the major hotels in St. Louis are unionized, while Charlotte's are not.
Labor unions have been a longtime bulwark of the Democratic Party.
Politico also noted that Charlotte has fewer hotel rooms than St. Louis.
Supporters of Charlotte's effort to win the convention have noted that Democrats held their 2008 national convention in Denver, where nearly all the hotels are not unionized.
The issue of unionized hotels has surfaced several times in recent weeks. Last month, a group composed of unionized hotel workers sent a letter to Democratic Party officials, asking that Charlotte and Cleveland be removed from consideration for the convention, because of a lack of unionized hotels.
Politico said Cleveland's AFL-CIO office sent a letter this week to Democratic Party Chairman Tom Kaine, saying the city has six union hotels downtown and a seventh near Hopkins International Airport.
Respondents to a survey organized by a Charlotte community organization disagree with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police statistics showing a dropping crime rate in the city.
About 80 percent of the approximately 500 people who participated in the survey said the crime problem in Charlotte is either unchanged or has gotten worse over the past two years.
The study was conducted in recent weeks by Neighbors For A Safer Charlotte, a grassroots organization founded in April 2008.
Their study results contrast with a steady stream of monthly crime statistics from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, showing -- for the most part -- that the crime rate has been dropping over the past 12 to 18 months. Earlier this week, CMPD statistics through March showed the overall crime rate is down 15 percent since the same time a year ago.
The survey results show that if CMPD statistics are correct, the perception among residents is that crime remains a big problem.
Respondents did not fall into the "lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key" category, as most of them said they support more mental health and substance abuse programs -- and said they believe only violent offenders should be put in jail.
Here are results from some of the organization's questions:
How much of a problem do you feel crime is in the Charlotte area?
75% rated it "serious" or "very serious"
In the past two years, has crime in Charlotte increased, stayed the same, or decreased?
42% said it is worse. Another 38% said it has remained the same.
Do you own a gun for protection?
31% said they owned a gun. Another 18 percent said they are considering buying one.
Which factors tend to increase the crime problem locally?
91% said gang and drug activity.
83% said the absence of a responsible parent or role model tends to increase crime activity among juveniles.
75% said lenient sentencing equals more crime.
50% said racial tensions were not likely to contribute to crime.
Not rated as significant factors were unemployment and poverty, and the lack of a police presence.
Have the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County done enough to deal with the crime problem?
79% said more needs to be done.
Are the courts too lenient or too tough?
78% said they are too lenient.
Do you plan to vote in the District Attorney race in November?
91% said they plan to vote in that contest.
What would help solve the crime problem?
96% said tougher sentencing.
88% said more programs for juveniles outside regular school hours.
85% said more mental health and substance abuse programs.
70% said only violent offenders should be incarcerated.
To determine our list, we used violent crime statistics from the FBI's latest uniform crime report, issued in 2008.
The violent crime category is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
We evaluated U.S. Metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by Federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics--with more than 500,000 residents.
Sources: CNN, CQ Press, DemComWatch, Forbes.com, McClatchy Newspapers, MSNBC, Neighbors For A Safer Charlotte, Politico, St. Louis Today, WCNC, Youtube, Google Maps
Camden, New Jersey, has reason to celebrate today. It is no longer ranked as the most dangerous city in America.
Camden is now the second most crime-ridden city, second to St. Louis, Missouri, according to CQ Press, which annually publishes reference books based on academic and government data. The most violent city list is based on the FBI's 2009 uniform crime statistics covering murder, rape, burglary, robbery, aggravated assault and vehicle theft.
According to CQ, St. Louis had over 2,000 crimes per 100,000 residents, compared to the national average of about 430 crimes per the same number of residents. For the second straight year, Colonie, a suburb of Albany, New York, had the least crime.
But such rankings tend to be oversimplifications, experts say. What's more, the FBI discourages using its stats to make sweeping generalizations about crime and whole cities, said John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Andrew Karmen. He specializes in crime statistics and has written extensively about how they can be manipulated or presented in a biased way.
"When you look at these rankings and lists, the findings fall apart," he said. Crime reporting is nuanced and is affected by factors that can differ from one zip code to another, much less one city to another.
CQ, which sells its book on the findings for $70, acknowledges that, said spokesman Ben Krasney.
"The data is not flawless," he said. "We're a reference publisher, a starting point for other research. Crime rates within boundaries of a city – whether one neighborhood has more crime than another – we don't get into that."
Karmen said it's important to consider how, why and when crime is reported in different cities. If a police department is perceived as friendly, a welcoming place to file a report or come forward as a victim, crime stats are going to appear higher, for example.
Although "uniform" crime statistics are supposed to be just that, crime classification can vary. Vehicular manslaughter might not always be classified as murder, but rather a crime involving a vehicle, he said.
The faltering economy is also a huge factor in crime data.
CQ reports that the top five most violent cities in America, from first to fifth, are St. Louis; Camden; Detroit, Michigan; Flint, Michigan; and Oakland, California.
"Consider the industrial aspects of some of those cities and what has happened with jobs and those markets in the past few years," said Karmen. "The whole picture cannot be fairly reduced to a list."
Greg Scarbro, unit chief of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, said the FBI also discourages using the data for these types of rankings.
Kara Bowlin, spokeswoman for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, said the city actually has been getting safer over the last few years. She said crime in St. Louis has gone down each year since 2007, and so far in 2010, St. Louis crime is down 7 percent.
Erica Van Ross, spokeswoman for the St. Louis Police Department, called the rankings irresponsible.
"Crime is based on a variety of factors. It's based on geography, it's based on poverty, it's based on the economy," Van Ross said.
"That is not to say that urban cities don't have challenges, because we do," Van Ross said. "But it's that it's irresponsible to use the data in this way."
Respondents to a survey organized by a Charlotte community organization disagree with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police statistics showing a dropping crime rate in the city.
About 80 percent of the approximately 500 people who participated in the survey said the crime problem in Charlotte is either unchanged or has gotten worse over the past two years.
The study was conducted in recent weeks by Neighbors For A Safer Charlotte, a grassroots organization founded in April 2008.
Their study results contrast with a steady stream of monthly crime statistics from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, showing -- for the most part -- that the crime rate has been dropping over the past 12 to 18 months. Earlier this week, CMPD statistics through March showed the overall crime rate is down 15 percent since the same time a year ago.
The survey results show that if CMPD statistics are correct, the perception among residents is that crime remains a big problem.
Respondents did not fall into the "lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key" category, as most of them said they support more mental health and substance abuse programs -- and said they believe only violent offenders should be put in jail.
Here are results from some of the organization's questions:
How much of a problem do you feel crime is in the Charlotte area?
75% rated it "serious" or "very serious"
In the past two years, has crime in Charlotte increased, stayed the same, or decreased?
42% said it is worse. Another 38% said it has remained the same.
Do you own a gun for protection?
31% said they owned a gun. Another 18 percent said they are considering buying one.
Which factors tend to increase the crime problem locally?
91% said gang and drug activity.
83% said the absence of a responsible parent or role model tends to increase crime activity among juveniles.
75% said lenient sentencing equals more crime.
50% said racial tensions were not likely to contribute to crime.
Not rated as significant factors were unemployment and poverty, and the lack of a police presence.
Have the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County done enough to deal with the crime problem?
79% said more needs to be done.
Are the courts too lenient or too tough?
78% said they are too lenient.
Do you plan to vote in the District Attorney race in November?
91% said they plan to vote in that contest.
What would help solve the crime problem?
96% said tougher sentencing.
88% said more programs for juveniles outside regular school hours.
85% said more mental health and substance abuse programs.
70% said only violent offenders should be incarcerated.
A Union representing hotel workers has asked the Democratic National Committee to rule out two of its four convention-site finalists, Cleveland and Charlotte, N.C., because they lack sufficient unionized hotel facilities.
"Among the DNC's four finalist cities, only St. Louis and Minneapolis" have the capacity to "house a large portion of the delegates and other guests ... in unionized hotels," John Wilhelm, president of the international UNITE HERE union of hotel and textile workers, wrote in a letter to DNC Chairman Tim Kaine.
"Therefore, one of those two cities should be the DNC's choice for 2012. Unfortunately, Charlotte and Cleveland do not fit the bill, and they should be removed from the list."
Though the letter was dated Oct. 6, it wasn't publicized until this week, when the union's Minneapolis local, eager to enhance its city's chances, issued a press release on the subject.
"We're just very interested in having the convention here on a number of levels, and for the international it's a priority that it be in a union city," said Wade Luneberg, secretary-treasurer and political director of UNITE HERE Local 17 in Minneapolis. "We think it's important to differentiate between the four [finalist] cities and see that Minneapolis and St. Louis rise to the top."
Charlotte, N.C., has no unionized hotels, and its convention center's employees are not union members, according to Wilhelm's letter. Cleveland has some union hotels, but only a handful in the downtown area and about 10 in the larger region; they belong to a competing union, Workers United.
UNITE HERE under Wilhelm split with former President Bruce Raynor in a bitter and protracted battle that ended last year with Raynor leaving and founding Workers United.
Workers United, which has affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, says it has 150,000 members, while UNITE HERE, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, claims 265,000.
A subcommittee of the DNC visited potential convention sites over the summer to evaluate their logistical suitability and advise the committee on their findings. A decision is expected in late 2010 or early 2011.
Democratic sources familiar with the decision-making process say Charlotte and St. Louis are the current front-runners, with Charlotte at a slight disadvantage because of its small overall hotel room stock.
Political considerations — including last week's election results — are expected to play a major role in the decision-making process. The defeat of a Democratic governor in Ohio may have hurt Cleveland's chances, while Minneapolis could be helped if Minnesota's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Mark Dayton, hangs on to win. He currently leads in the count in a race that is likely to go to a recount.
The Minneapolis area has at least 20 union hotels totaling 5,300 rooms, with more than 2,000 workers, Wilhelm's letter notes. St. Louis, the letter says, has 10 union hotels with more than 3,000 rooms. Both cities' sports arenas and convention centers are unionized as well.
"Employees at union hotels are far more likely than employees in non-union hotels to get the sort of basic fair treatment for which the Democratic Party stands — good wages, affordable health benefits, stable long-term positions, and respect and a voice on the job," Wilhelm wrote. "For these reasons, those employees are more likely to provide delegates and guests with better service as well."
UNITE HERE official Pilar Weiss said the DNC was receptive to the union's concerns. "It's early on," she said. "We're having a dialogue with them."
A spokesman for the DNC, Hari Sevugan, said, "As always, we are looking at a number of factors and will have an announcement in the coming months."
To determine our list, we used violent crime statistics from the FBI's latest uniform crime report, issued in 2008.
The violent crime category is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
We evaluated U.S. Metropolitan statistical areas--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by Federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics--with more than 500,000 residents.
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