“These megaleaks ... they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase,' said WikiLeaks' Julian Assange in a rare interview with Forbes in 2010
Share to twitterIn a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings.
He’ll see to that. By the time you’re reading this another giant dump of classified U.S. documents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet. Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his exposés, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks simultaneously on his site.
What do large companies think of the threat? If they’re terrified, they’re not saying. None would talk to us. Nor would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks “is high profile, legally insulated and transnational,” says former Commerce Department official James Lewis, who follows cybersecurity for the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “That adds up to a reputational risk that companies didn’t have to think about a year ago.
If even a fraction of his claims are borne out, he’s already sitting on a crypt of data any three-letter spy agency would kill for. The world’s most vocal transparency advocate is now one of the world’s biggest keepers of secrets. And about half of those revelations, says Assange, relate to the private sector.
The best protection? With a dash of irony Icelandic WikiLeaks staffer Kristinn Hrafnsson suggests that companies change their ways to avoid targeting. “They should resist the temptation to enter into corruption,” he says. Don Tapscott, coauthor of The Naked Corporation , agrees. His simplistic conclusion: “Open your own kimono. You’re going to be naked. So you have to dig deep, look at your whole operation, make sure that integrity is part of your bones.
Zatko is not your typical Department of Defense employee. Even in his new Beltway digs, he prefers to be called “Mudge,” the hacker handle he used during decades of exploring the dark corners of the Internet. Frank Heidt, a former security staffer at MCI and several military contractors, says that when he first read Zatko’s exploit research in mid-1990s hacker zines, he thought that Mudge must be the pseudonym of a group. “He was so prolific that I thought he couldn’t be one person,” Heidt says.
The problem: DLP doesn’t work. Data is simply created too quickly, and moved around too often, for a mere filter to catch it, says Richard Stiennon, an analyst for security consultancy IT-Harvest, in Birmingham, Mich. “For DLP to function, all the stars have to align,” he says. “This is a huge problem that can’t be stopped with a single layer of infrastructure.”
“You put all these things together into the different components of the mission,” says Zatko. “I’m looking for these new rhythms, new tells, new interrelations and requirements.” Those who took Agustsson’s advice found a summary of Kaupthing’s loan book posted on the site, detailing more than $6 billion funneled from Kaupthing’s coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, often with little or no collateral; $900 million went to Olafur Olafsson, a major investor in Kaupthing who, on his birthday, flew in Elton John from England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert.
Working with the country’s transparency activists, she pulled together the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or Immi. The initiative would bring to Iceland all the source-protection, freedom of information and transparency laws from around the world and even set up a Nobel-style international award for work in the field of free expression. Jonsdottir pushed through a unanimous resolution to create a series of bills to implement Immi.
Instead Immi would foster a new wave of media organizations and whistleblower outlets that don’t rely on WikiLeaks’ technical savvy or resources. Already a handful of smaller, leak-focused conduits—regional sites like Africa-focused SaharaReporters or Thaileaks.info—have published damning data. Immi’s McCarthy says he’s been approached by media organizations from Rwanda to Chechnya.
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