Assange suggests bank documents are a snore

[struggle4progress]

By Mark Hosenball
LONDON | Wed Feb 9, 2011 5:02pm EST

... Assange has said privately he does not know if his cache of internal Bank of America (BAC.N) data, whose public release he has suggested might be imminent, contains any big news or scandal, according to three people familiar with the WikiLeaks leader's private discussions about the material.

They said that Assange said it consists of e-mails from the hard-drive of a Bank of America executive's computer and that the latest messages are dated sometime in 2006.

The sources said that Assange privately acknowledged the material was not self-explanatory and that he personally was unable to make much sense of it. Assange indicated it would require a substantial amount of effort by financial experts to determine whether any of the material was newsworthy, according to the sources.

Assange's private characterizations of the Bank of America material as being dated and difficult to interpret contrasts with inflammatory public statements he has made -- some as recently as last month -- touting the significance of bank-related materials WikiLeaks has been planning to publish ...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/09/us-wikileaks-bankofamerica-idUSTRE7185W620110209

[tabatha]

1. Deceptive.

Wish he had not said that he could bring a bank down.

[DJ13]

2. It could be someone with accounting experience told him its a bombshell

But to someone without that knowledge (like Assange) it would like like random numbers, which could be why he said the two different things.

[struggle4progress]

3. He reportedly has 5 gb of emails downloaded from an executive's hard drive

That's potentially a whole lot of emails. I'm assuming they weren't all written by one person and that nobody at wikileaks has had the patience to try to read all of them

[DJ13]

4. yikes, thats a lot of mail!

[Demeter]

5. give them to Yves Smith!

She can plow through them and explain....she wrote ECONNED.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. Oh, my, three nameless people

who are "familiar with the WikiLeaks leader's private discussions about the material" are said to have said that, so it MUST be true!

[Bodhi BloodWave]

7. well, i'd say there is just about as much reason to trust these nameless "whistleblowers" :p

as its to trust the nameless officials that keeps 'leaking' what Obama plans to do(like with the reduction in heating money)

Both have nameless people stating something, however for some reason the unnamed official seems to be taken at his word, while those 'leaking' info on Assange are doubted.

[Art_from_Ark]

9. The man who blew the whistle on the Swiss banks isn't nameless

Neither is the one who blew the whistle on military abuses.

But both of them are in hot water for blowing the whistle.

[Art_from_Ark]

10. And if you want to talk about reducing heating money

the Massachusetts Democratic Congressional delegation believe the "unnamed source" enough that they are taking proactive action too make sure the money won't be reduced:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x393846

[struggle4progress]

8. Fair enough, but Assange has been hyping this since October 2009, so perhaps it's

not unreasonable for media to begin looking for other sources of info on the topic ...




... “We are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” Assange said in the Oct. 9, 2009, interview with Computerworld magazine, referring to five gigabytes of data. “To have impact it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search and get something out of it.”

WikiLeaks plans to release “either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it,” Assange said in a Nov. 11 interview with Forbes, declining to identify the bank from which the documents came. He said the release would occur early next year and would include “some flagrant violations, unethical practices.” ...

Five gigabytes can hold about 323,900 pages if saved as Microsoft Word documents or 500,500 pages of e-mails ...

WikiLeaks Founder Assange Plans Release of U.S. Bank's Documents Next Year
By David Mildenberg
Tue Nov 30 ... 2010
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-30/wikileaks-says-it-holds-documents-from-bank-of-america-executive.html