[Illustration by AARON MITCHELL]
FORBES: Early next year, Julian Assange 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. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on. When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a 
London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “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.” MORE
RELATED: Bank of America Corp. stock fell Tuesday afternoon on speculation that it might be the target of a WikiLeaks document release early next year. The bank’s stock was down 36 cents, or 3.2 percent to $10.95. In an interview published in the latest issue of Forbes magazine, the founder of the whistle-blower organization, Julian Assange, said he plans to release tons of internal documents from a major U.S. bank early next year. “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,” he told Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.” While Assange wouldn’t identify the bank to Forbes, he had said last year in a separate interview with Computerworld that he had several gigabytes of data from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive. A spokesman for Bank of America said in a statement: “We are unaware of any new claims by Wikileaks that pertain specifically to Bank of America.” MORE
TIME: Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, “should resign.” Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange’s organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like “the fall guy” in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. “I don’t think it would make much of a difference either way,” Assange said. “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.” MORE
NEW YORK TIMES: Interpol has placed the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing Web site on a so-called red notice wanted list following allegations of sexual misbehavior by a Swedish prosecutor, according to the police organization’s Web site on Wednesday. The notice said Mr. Assange, 39, was wanted for “sex crimes” on an arrest warrant brought by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. Interpol is based in Lyon, France. Mr. Assange’s whereabouts were not immediately known. MORE
REUTERS: U.S. authorities could face insurmountable legal hurdles if they try to bring criminal charges against elusive WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, even if he sets foot on U.S. soil. The Justice Department is investigating a series of leaks of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents that the whistleblower website has provided to news media and made public on its own website. But three specialists in espionage law said prosecuting someone like Assange on those charges would require evidence the defendant was not only in contact with representatives of a foreign power but also intended to provide them with secrets. No such evidence has surfaced, or has even been alleged, in the case of WikiLeaks or Assange. MORE
RELATED: In a shockingly flippant comment to a Canadian television news anchor Evan Solomon of the CBC News Network on live TV, Tom Flanagan, a senior advisor and strategist to the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper today called for the assassination of Wikileaks director Julian Assange. Tom Flanagan said the U.S. President should put out a “contract” on Assange or use “a drone” and that he would not be unhappy if Assange “disappeared.” MORE