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Can WikiLeaks tame Wall Street

The Business Spectator has an article by Andrew Leonard looking at some of the implications of the upcoming Wikileaks dump of data from a large American bank - Can WikiLeaks tame Wall Street?.

Forbes magazine is making a very big deal of a declaration by WikiLeaks maestro Julian Assange that sometime early next year, "a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out."

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. "But its also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight thats not done, the priorities of executives, how they think theyre fulfilling their own self-interest."

Strangely, despite devoting thousands of words to a blossoming war between the technologists seeking to provide the private sector with leak-proof security systems and the information-wants-to-be-free revolutionaries personified by Assange, reporter Andy Greenbergs original story had two big holes. First, he missed Assanges assertion last year, published by ComputerWorld, that he was sitting on five gigabytes of data liberated from Bank of America, which puts that institution at the top of the list of likely exposure suspects. But more important, Greenberg doesnt devote much attention to what a world in which big corporations cannot keep the lid on their internal communications and deliberations sealed would look like.

There seems little doubt that that world is coming. Whatever you think of the ethics or legality of such involuntary disclosure, or regard Assange as a noble whistle-blower or rank terrorist, theres no getting around how easy it is to dump vast amounts of information into the public domain in the era of portable hard drives and ubiquitous Net access. From the dawn of the computer age, information has become ever harder to control, and theres no sign of that changing any time soon. Quite the contrary, as proven by the current flurry of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables released.

But what will it mean, practically speaking? Ideally, greater transparency is supposed to improve market efficiency. So if, say, a data dump on a big bank revealed the corruption at the heart of that institutions operations, it would be punished by the market, perhaps to the point of going out of business. In the interview with Forbes, Assange goes so far as to assert that "one or two" big banks may collapse as a result of WikiLeaks revelations.

Could Julian Assange achieve what a global financial meltdown failed to accomplish? Perhaps, if the information is fresh enough and reveals financial problems previously unknown. Or maybe there will be juicy material that gets plugged immediately into the proliferating investor lawsuits raking over dubious securities trade of the last decade.

But thats all after the fact. The more interesting question is to wonder whether the threat or certainty of eventual exposure has any kind of prophylactic effect on behaviour. For example, would the financial crisis have played out any differently if we could have read every e-mail or text written by Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch mortgage bond traders during the hot and heavy days of the housing boom?