Over at Forbes, Andy Greenberg interviews Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who tells him that they’re planning a release early next year of a huge cache of internal documents from a big U.S. bank:
What do you want to be the result of this release?
[Pauses] I’m not sure. 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.
Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable.
This gave me pause when I read it. As I said earlier, I’m on the fence a bit about whether an indiscriminate release of thousands of U.S. embassy cables is useful. After all, governments have a legitimate need for confidential diplomacy. But when I read about WikiLeaks’ planned financial expose, I felt no such qualms. A huge release of internal documents from a big bank? Bring it on!
And yet, just like governments, big corporations have both a legitimate need for confidential deliberations as well as many of the same pathologies that secrecy breeds. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, on a variety of levels, but still: it’s not all that different either. So why do I feel so differently about it? I’m not quite sure. But it suggests that my thinking about this is not as clear as it should be. I will continue to mull this over.
