

The mistake WikiLeaks made - corpceo

I'm the CEO of a US corporation. This is a throwaway account.<p>I admire Julian Assange greatly. As the CEO of a company that provides services to Bloggers, I have seen first hand the good that free speech does. I believe that freedom of the press and freedom of speech is perhaps the greatest contributor to the success of the experiment that is the United States and many other countries that allow transparency.<p>I grew up in South Africa during Apartheid and witnessed first hand the evil that an opaque government perpetrates. It seems power without accountability inevitably leads to great evil.<p>I wholeheartedly supported Wikileaks disclosure of the Iraq footage of the death of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen. I support the disclosure of the entire trove of diplomatic cables, even though most of the cables are not items of public interest - the test that traditional news organizations apply in deciding whether to disclose sensitive material.<p>Recently Julian and his organization said that they would release internal material that would sink a major US bank. The implication is clear: Wikileaks target's are not limited to governments. Corporations are fair game too.<p>In making this decision, Wikileaks lost many of their remaining friends with power. I'm not advocating whether or not this was the morally correct decision to make, but I would like to point out that it was a strategic blunder.<p>Since then Amazon have booted Wikileaks off their servers days after allowing them on. Today Paypal suspended their account.<p>While these events are quite probably unrelated to Wikileaks targeting corporations, it's unlikely that the executives in these companies would go out of their way to help Wikileaks after the organization has made it clear that corporations are fair game.<p>I recently had the pleasure of debating the wikileaks situation with a friend who has spent his entire career in Aerospace protecting government secrets. We agreed to disagree on the level of transparency that is acceptable. But he asked me how I would react if my intellectual property was published by Wikileaks. At the time I said that I would target the individuals who stole the IP and would leave Wikileaks alone. When Julian Assange made the announcement that he's targeting US companies I suddenly found myself emotionally engaged in the argument and discovered that I felt differently. I felt that organizations like Wikileaks could threaten my family's livelihood and that of my employees.<p>I tend to err on the side of maximum transparency. But I think that by targeting corporations, wikileaks has lost a critical source of support in the important work they're doing.<p>I'd like to hear how startup CEO's and executives on HN feel about wikileaks from a business perspective.<p>~torq
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kaiwen1
Whatever Wikileaks publishes on the bank in question, you can be certain that
it will contain evidence of a pattern of probably illegal and certainly
unethical behavior. If corporate governance and regulatory oversight are
failing to prevent such behavior, then Wikileaks is providing a valuable
service to everyone by exposing that behavior. Everyone, that is, except the
bank in question, complicit organizations, and employees of those
organizations.

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kaiwen1
One more thing to add. Paypal and the other companies that pulled the plug on
Wikileaks did not pull it in protest to Wikileaks targeting of a bank. These
plug-pullers seem to be a rather benign bunch. They probably have no dirty big
secrets and therefore they–like the rest of society–actually stand to gain by
Wikileaks exposing bad behavior among business. The only businesses that stand
to lose, and therefore the ones that should be worried about it, are the
businesses that are engaged in foul play or benefiting from it. So, ahem, why
exactly are you so bothered, sir

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_delirium
I agree it's probably a strategic error, but I don't think it's actually very
easy to distinguish governmental secrets from corporate ones, especially if
you have to be somewhat opportunist in what secrets come across your desk. For
example, what if you were interested in exposing the web of corruption that is
the African oil and gas industry? Leaking documents on the subject from major
multinational oil companies is probably the best route. You could try to only
go after it from the governmental side, leaking documents from corrupt regimes
that take bribes and rig auctions, but if you're a mainly western-based
organization like Wikileaks, you might have easier access to internal
documents from Exxon versus internal documents from the Nigerian government.
The Nigerian government may have also been more careful about whether any of
that ever got written down, so Exxon's side might actually have the best
documentation.

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iwr
The comparison is wrong. Informations that could lead to the downfall of a
corporation would not be plain industrial secrets (irrelevant politically).
Companies would have nothing to fear if they did nothing objectionable from an
ethical or criminal standpoint.

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zmmz
Exactly, WikiLeaks is not going to publish a corporation's IP. What it would
publish is information revealing dirty practices.

The Enron scandal is something that the wikileaks would be interested in
publishing. They would not publish Intel's chip designs.

I also work in the financial field (for a company that has more public
responsibility than your average), and we have a whistle-blower hotline
internally. If you see any "dirty practice" you are encouraged to report it
ASAP. As the CEO, I can only encourage you to create this procedure in your
company.

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BillGoates
It wouldn't be the first time Wikileaks went after corporations. Half a year
ago they published a document about how shareholders plundered the islandic
bank Kaupthing before it collapsed.

Publishing intellectual property would be illegal, and I fail to see why
anyone would fear Wikileaks for doing such.

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derrida
it is only a strategic error because if they target governments they can be
politically supported by corporations and vice-versa. one place doing both
things looses a lot of friends. but i am sure if you took a strawpoll of every
technically literate person in the world what they thought of wikileaks, a
resounding majority would be in support.

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hkon
I think it is very revealing...

