Banking and WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is a global non-profit media association that distributes acquiescence of otherwise unavailable documents from nameless sources and leaks. Its website, which was started in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press (WikiLeaks, 2011). In 2010, the director of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said that he planned to take down a main American bank and make known a network of dishonesty with a collection of data from an executive's hard drive. With Bank of America's share price declining on the broadly held thought that the hard drive was theirs, those in charge figured out it was time to take action. Since then, a team of fifteen to twenty top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, has been managing a broad interior investigation, combing thousands of documents in the result that they become public, evaluating every instance where a computer has gone missing and looking for any sign that its systems might have been compromised. Additionally the interior team comprised of members of finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in a consulting firm, in order to help administer the review. It has also sought after advice from more than a few top law firms about legal troubles that could arise from a revelation, including the bank's possible liability if private information was revealed about customers (Schwartz, 2011).
The company's chief executive gets normal updates on the team's development. Whether Mr. Assange is faking, or definitely has Bank of America in its sights at all, the bank's security plan symbolizes the newest bend in the controversy over WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange. The United States government has been looking at whether Mr. Assange, could be charged legally for the making public by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department diplomatic documents that became the topic of many stories in The New York Times (Schwartz, 2011).
The fact that Mr. Assange might indeed transfer his concentration to a private company, particularly one as politically disliked as Bank of America or any of its competitors, which have been blemished by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the exposure of inappropriate foreclosure procedures, gives way to a new kind of corporate risk, joining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations. This is an important incident, and Bank of America knew that they had to get out in front of it. Corporate America has to pay attention to what takes place here, and how Bank of America handles it. Not long after this the bank bought up Web addresses that could prove uncomfortable to the corporation or its top executives in the event of a large size public attack (Schwartz, 2011).
The thing that prompted this attack by WikiLeaks came when Bank of America said it would unite with other companies like MasterCard and PayPal in halting the processing of payments intended for WikiLeaks, citing the possibility the organization's activities might be unlawful. Mr. Assange has never said openly that the data he had was indeed that of Bank of America, which is the country's biggest bank, though he did say that the revelation would take place a bit early this year. The bank has come out as the most likely target for the reason that a year before the latest warning, Mr. Assange said that his group had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive including five gigabytes of data, sufficient to hold more than two hundred thousand pages of text, and was looking at how to release it (Schwartz, 2011).
The question that arises out of all of this is whether Bank of America should refuse to process payments and do business with WikiLeaks? All businesses, but especially those financial in nature must take precaution to minimize any risks that they identify to their business. One are of risk that banks must look at is that of processing risky transactions. Banks currently, at the...
Chase. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2011. Print. Retrieved on 21 February, 2013 from < http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-WikiLeaks-Assange-Dangerous- Website/dp/0224094017#reader_0224094017 Higgins, Melissa. Julian Assange: Wikileaks Founder. Edina, MI: ABDO Pub. Co, 2012. Internet resource. Retrieved on 21 February, 2013 from < http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=40YFSyEhBtMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Julia n+Assange:+Wikileaks+Founder&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RwImUef5EsmqtAbiroGwAw& ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=transparency&f=false Leigh, David, Luke Harding, Edward Pilkington, Robert Booth, and Charles Arthur. Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. New York: Public Affairs, 2011. Internet resource. Retrieved on
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