WikiLeaks media organization celebrated ten years of activity during a press conference in Berlin on Tuesday, with an announcement that a new batch of documents will be released over the next two months. This batch specifically targets the US government and Google.
WikiLeaks has worked to unveil the activities of businesses and governments around the world.
“Our upcoming series includes significant material on war, arms, oil, Google, the U.S. elections, and myself,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said via video link from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living since 2012. He also said the documents would be released before the end of the year, with the first cache coming within the week.
Significant anticipation surrounded Tuesday’s announcement, which was reconfigured due to “security concerns.”
The New York Times noted, “[the] remarks from Mr. Assange disappointed many followers of WikiLeaks in the United States, who had stayed up into the early hours hoping to hear information relevant to the presidential election.”
According to The Verge, “There was a lot of build-up to today’s press conference, in anticipation of what had been billed as an “October surprise” that could swing the U.S. presidential election. Instead, WikiLeaks devoted most of the event to recounting its most notorious releases and refuting criticism levied against it.
Assange acknowledged the anticipation of a bombshell release in a winding address to reporters, though he declined to say whether the upcoming leaks would tilt the election toward Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
“There is enormous expectation in the United States,” Assange said of the forthcoming leaks. “Some of that expectation will be partly answered; but you should understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3am.”
Assange quashed the idea that the WikiLeaks “surprise” would cripple Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign by saying, “The idea that ‘we intend to harm Hillary Clinton,’ or I intend to harm Hillary Clinton, or I don’t like Hillary Clinton, all those are false.”
“WikiLeaks has provided a unique and quite outstanding service to the people of the world,” said radical anti-Zionist leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky on Tuesday, “bringing to them information that they should and deserve to have and that has been illegitimately concealed by systems of power.”
