People have been divided about whether WikiLeaks' release of those low-level confidential diplomatic messages was a good thing or a bad one. The target of the next big leak may be a lot more widely approved, at least by regular people who have had it with getting screwed by the big banks:
In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn’t say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation’s bad behavior.
"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"...
The target will be a single bank, but its documents will be representative, Assange says, of how the financial sector as a whole functions.
"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," Assange added. "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."
And WikiLeaks' next target after the banks? Pharmaceutical companies.
Read the full Forbes interview with Assange here.