Apparently the group Anonymous have started their own leak site. And rather than concentrating on political leaks, they seem to be focused on investigating financial frauds. Their first leak comes from the major Chinese agricultural company Chaoda.
The report exposes how Chaoda's management has deceived shareholders, how several high level executives have resigned due to "personal reasons" through the past years, on how billions of dollars are missing in Chaoda's financial statements, transactions with a fertilizer company that never existed, and how they paid a fake branding company to fake their brand value (stuff of legends).
I had mixed feelings while reading Anonymous's report. Though facts and figures were presented concisely and somewhat entertainingly - with quotes from The Simpson and Seinfeld - it's not clear on how they obtained some information. They do say in their website that their team is made up of "analysts, forensic accountants, statisticians, computer experts, and lawyers from various jurisdictions and backgrounds", and it's very possible that these guys didn't spend much time in academia to get into the habit of citing what they claim, or at least letting people know how they got the information. Being an anonymous group, it makes things a tad bit fishy as well. How does one go about peer-reviewing these articles/investigations? There's no doubt that their efforts will have an effect on the stock market (see Chaoda's value) so how does one make sure that personal interests are not being pursued in the disguise of financial transparency?
But this anonymous nature of Anonymous might well be a matter of survival for the group. If Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are manhandled in a government where the the president won a nobel-peace prize, it's highly unlikely that a leaking group could ever do their work in the open - anywhere. So the ambiguous credibility may possibly be something that we'll have to deal with for now.
And even with all these ambiguities, I'm a tad bit optimistic about Anonymous Analytics. Mostly because it's easier to place faith in capitalist markets than with democracy. And while Wikileaks did prove to be a good feedback mechanism in oppressed states like Tunisia and Egypt that had crippled human rights of their citizens, it's highly unlikely that any other society would be moved to create a revolution by political leaks alone. And unlike in those oppressed states where governments control businesses, in the developed world, corporations control governments. So the most potent leaks might well be financial than political for the developed world. When shareholders are given the proper feedback, which is what happened with Chaoda, they have the power to vote down the price of a corporation and thus re-establishing democracy to the developed world.
