Is Bank Of America WikiLeaks’ Next Target?

Nov. 30 2010 - 12:24 pm | 16,761 views | 1 recommendation | 5 comments

By ANDY GREENBERG

Updated with link to Bank of America statement below.

When I spoke with WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange earlier this month, he told me that in early 2011, the whistleblower site would release a “megaleak” regarding a major U.S. bank. That release, Assange said, would include tens of thousands of its documents that reveal some sort of unethical behavior. No details on the name or what sort of bad behavior would be exposed.

Now an eagle-eyed reader has sent me a link to a quote from a Computer World interview with Assange from October of 2009, which, if true, may contain a clue to that bank’s identity:

“At the moment, for example, we are sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”

I’ve contacted WikiLeaks for confirmation but haven’t immediately received a response–its staff is likely tied up by the fallout of its release of a quarter million diplomatic cables, and by the second of two cyberattacks to strike its website in the last few days. Bank Of America didn’t respond to a request for comment either.

If Assange does plan to release the five gigabytes of data he referenced in the Computer World interview, it’s very plausible that he’s been sitting on it for more than a year. As he’s quoted saying at the time, a full five gigabyte of documents was likely beyond the scope of WikiLeaks’ resources at the time to filter, organize, and publish. Today, compared with the 392,000 Iraq war documents the site dumped in October and the millions of diplomatic documents that WikiLeaks has promised to eventually release, it would be fairly standard.

There’s no telling what might be revealed in any Bank of America documents–if Assange does indeed have them–but it could be old news. By the time of publication, the documents would be more than 14 months old. And, as much as any bank on Wall Street, BoA has been scrutinized in recent years by everyone from plaintiffs’ attorneys in class-action investor suits to the New York Attorney General’s office.

And why would Assange hold onto the documents for so long before publishing them? He’s said he simply has too much material.

Here’s a key excerpt of that interview:

Assange: If you think about it, we have a publishing pipeline that’s increasing linearly, and an exponential number of leaks, so we’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.

Me: So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?

Assange: Yes, but maybe not as high impact…I mean, it could take down a bank or two.

Me: That sounds like high impact.

Assange: But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.

To be clear, there’s no clear confirmation that the upcoming release will focus on Bank of America. Assange told me that he had unpublished, potentially damaging documents on multiple finance firms, beyond the bank “megaleak” that we discussed. I’ll provide an update if I can learn more.

Update: Scott Silvestri, a Bank of America spokesman, told the New York Times Dealbook blog in a statement: “More than a year ago WikiLeaks claimed to have the computer hard drive of a Bank of America executive. Aside from the claims themselves we have no evidence that supports this assertion. We are unaware of any new claims by WikiLeaks that pertain specifically to Bank of America.”

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