UPDATE: In a new blog post, Forbes writer Andy Greenberg stops short of ruling Bank of America out as the target of WikiLeaks' next major document dump -- and he says Assange told him that WikiLeaks has documents from "multiple finance firms." Greenberg also noted that whatever information Assange was referring to in 2009 Computer World interview, it is now roughly 14 months old.
ORIGINAL POST: The next target of WikiLeaks may be Bank of America, if comments made last year by the organization's editor-in-chief Julian Assange are any indication.
In an October 2009 interview with Computer World , Assange said that Wikileaks had acquired a large cache of information from Bank of America (hat tip to Raw Story.)
Here's Assange's 2009 interview:
"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."
In a cover story interview with Forbes, Assange hinted that his organization's next focus will be on uncovering corporate America's secrets. While he declined to identify which bank he'd be targeting, Assange did comment on WikiLeaks' next move, which should come in a matter of weeks. Here's Assange on the material:
"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."
The added attention couldn't come at a worse time for Bank of America, which is currently embroiled in a federal racketeering lawsuit over its alleged use of "robo-signers" to process foreclosure documents. The bank is also facing battles over mortgage buybacks and new accusations that it routinely mishandled mortgage notes.