For weeks I have been speculating that the driving force behind apparent attempts by the US government to censor Wikileaks are banks. Today, in an opinion piece at the NY Times, the paper ponders the possibility and its affect on financial reporting.
Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.
Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.
What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.
Now that the question is out in the open will the NY Times or establishment media actually take the next step and investigate whether it is true? Or, will they sit back and wait for Wikileaks to provide access to the Bank of America executive’s hard drive and leave it at that?
