Earlier this week, the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange announced that he will soon start leaking sensitive documents which will expose various shady practices Google is allegedly involved in. That information was supposed to be published in several larger document dumps and according to latest reports, the leaks were supposed to start coming out yesterday. They were supposed to, but didn’t.
In fact, the only thing we got yesterday was another announcement from Assange who has now revealed the schedule for these leaks. Namely, the Australian national revealed that sensitive documents will be published on a weekly basis all the way until the US presidential elections which are slated for November 8th. Granted, a lot of the upcoming documents are supposed to be uncovering corrupt practices in the oil and weapons industry, as well as the Democratic National Committee in the US but during his announcement, Assange still found time to mention Google specifically when talking about corrupt entities that WikiLeaks will now supposedly expose.
Assange’s beef with Google isn’t purely ideological, but ideology certainly plays a big part in his dislike for the Mountain View-based tech giant. The Australian national who’s currently living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been supporting the idea of a decentralized Internet for quite a while now so it isn’t hard to see why he would be opposed to the very idea of an omnipresent Internet company like Google. Furthermore, he specifically details his dealings with Google in his 2014 book “When Google Met WikiLeaks” and specifically accuses the company of being too close to the US government. Speaking of the US government, Assange is also rather distrustful of Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt because of his connections to the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. In Assange’s eyes, the problem doesn’t solely lie in the fact that Google has been closely cooperating with a government agency but that it has closely cooperated with a government agency which accused WikiLeaks of attacking the US foreign relations in an attempt to destabilize the country. Dramatic or not, this accusation was made by Clinton herself back in 2010.
Last but not least, Assange is also keen to hurt Google’s public image due to the fact that the company has allegedly violated the privacy of three of WikiLeaks staffers by giving their private information to the US government as a part of an undisclosed investigation into WikiLeaks in 2012 and then took three whole years to notify them that their privacy has been violated. It’s worth noting that the upcoming leaks won’t be the first batch of sensitive documents concerning Google that Assange has released so far. However, his attempts to hurt the tech giant have been relatively unsuccessful as nothing WikiLeaks published until today has really incriminated Google.