Wikileaks head Julian Assange told Forbes that the next leak will be regarding a major American bank. He said that Wikileaks plans to release the documents early next year.
Assange told Computer World in October 2009:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
Indeed, speculation that the leak could be about Bank of America is going viral, being reported by CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Huffington Post and elsewhere.
As Joe Weisenthal writes today: "Bank Of America Selling Accelerates, As Fears Spread That It's In The Wikileaks Crosshairs". The Associated Press soon picked up on the same story.
(Bank of America is the largest U.S. bank.)
But the Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe of Wiklileaks, Assange may face espionage charges, representative Peter King is asking that Wikileaks be designated a foreign terrorist organization like Al Qaeda, some have called for Assange's assassination (and see this and this), and Wikileaks' website is under attack by hackers. And Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for Assange on rape charges.
Unless Wikileaks quickly moves up the release of the bank documents, it may be shut down before it has the chance to organize them so that they are easy to search.
Wikileaks could, of course, leak the raw documents now "into one giant Zip file", and then - if it is still able to do so - leak the organized version later.
Admittedly, if Wikileaks is really a "clever Psyops front", then the bank release might just be about unsavory - but perfectly legal - shenanigans.
