WikiLeaks to target major US bank next

WASHINGTON - WikiLeaks plans to release thousands of internal documents from a major US bank in early 2011, Forbes magazine reported Monday.

Julian Assange, the founder of the self-proclaimed whistleblower website, told Forbes: “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.” He compared the planned release to emails unveiled after the collapse of energy giant Enron Corp.

The website’s latest expose was the release of more than 250,000 secret US documents Sunday, which exposed years of diplomatic communications and provided candid assessments of world leaders.

“You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” Assange told Forbes during an interview in London, but refused to provide details about the bank.

“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.”

Forbes, which described Assange as a moral ideologue, a champion of openness and a control freak, said he pondered on a “cute name” for these “big-package releases,” finally settling for “megaleaks”.

“These megaleaks … they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase,” he claimed.

The site that first went public in late 2006 is by now used to making headlines the world over - first with the release in July of 92,000 secret documents that detailed six years of the war in Afghanistan; next in October after publishing nearly 400,000 classified US military documents related to the war in Iraq; and Sunday with the leak of more than a quarter million documents detailing communications between the State Department in Washington and more than 270 worldwide outposts.