Corporate whistleblower leaking dangerously
Jinfo Blog

1st February 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Evidence that all was not well at Wikileaks – the confidential not-for-profit site for leaking corporate and government secrets – has been emerging for a month or more. Now the site has announced that it has suspended all operations other than fundraising, and is currently offering no access to the hundreds of thousands of pages that it usually makes freely available – although it is still accepting leaked documents. Although it may have mainly had repressive governments in its sights when it was first launched about three years ago (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e3) it actually also has an impressive record in exposing corporate misdeeds. Notable successes include blowing the whistle on irregular transactions by a subsidiary of Bank Julius Baer (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e4933) and, more recently, pointing the finger at Trafigura for trying to suppress documents relating to its dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25813). Each of these affairs demonstrated the declining potency of court injunctions as a means of preventing the circulation of inconvenient truths. Baer’s injunction was rendered useless by the number of Wikileaks mirror sites that were still able to function; and in Trafigura’s case, so many bloggers and Twitterers chose to disclose the gagged information that it would have proved impossible to sue them all. Now Wikileaks (http://www.wikileaks.org/) seems to have been laid low by its own success. It’s overloaded by its readers and doesn’t have the server power to support them all; it needs donated legal talent; and it can’t take money from corporations or governments as that would compromise its integrity. In an interview on the BBC’s Culture Show (http://digbig.com/5bbaqj), Wikileaks editor Julian Assange claimed an ‘enormous support base’, especially amongst the press. But paidContent:UK has reported that an auction process that it tried out – selling leaks to media outlets as exclusives before publishing them more generally – hadn’t met with success thus far (http://digbig.com/5bbaqm). Whether as competitive intelligence researchers, due diligence specialists or simply as content purchasers, corporate information professionals ought to sit up and take note; the loss of Wikileaks could deprive them of a valuable and unusual source of intelligence. Indeed, in that same BBC Culture Show piece, pioneer internet leaker John Young maintained that we needed multiple Wikileaks and that it was ‘dangerous to have only one or two’. Of course, records managers who act as the custodians of their own organisations’ confidential data may decide that they’d be glad to see the back of it. But that would be to misread the situation; the model won’t go away, so if they thought the demise of Wikileaks would change anything, they’d be deluding themselves.

« Blog