PayPal Withdraws WikiLeaks Donation Service

ItsIllak writes "The BBC are reporting that PayPal is the latest company to abandon WikiLeaks. The list now includes their DNS providers (EveryDNS) and their hosts (Amazon). PayPal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company, as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices." Adds reader jg21: "As open source freedom fighter Simon Phipps writes in his ComputerWorldUK blog, behavior like this by Amazon and Tableau [and now PayPal] 'informs us as customers of web services and cloud computing services that we are never safe from intentional outages when the business interests of our host are challenged.'"

Comments

Re:3 cheers for Land of the Free!!

[electron sponge]

Yea! Aren't you PROUD to be an American?

Yes

Really?

[inotocracy]

I think it's pretty commonly known that paypal sucks. Not that long ago Paypal locked the account of the indie developer of Minecraft for no good reason, holding over $600k hostage.

In your face.

[unity100]

Doing that wasnt on my mind even. Thanks, whichever moron, has pressurized paypal to suspend them. They made me donate to wikileaks.

Thank you for your donation.

Your payment of EUR 25 has been received 4.12.2010 16:02:31
With your VISA xxxxxxxxxxxx9516
Reference : 5729


The Wikileaks Team, Sunshine Press

Re:Innocent until proven guilty?

[squiggleslash]

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

Re:Innocent until proven guilty?

[squiggleslash]

Wikileaks didn't point out any of those wrong doings, which is what a Whistle-blower site is supposedly supposed to be doing. pointing out wrongs that need to be corrected. Instead they just dumped the cables on the internet and real journalists dug through them to find a (very) few incidents of questionable activity.

This is not true, from start to finish.

Wikileaks worked with journalists and has only dumped the subset of documents that journalists consider newsworthy on the Internet. The full archive is, as yet, unavailable to the public. I believe an encrypted version is floating around, the famous "insurance policy" of Assange, but, well, encrypted is encrypted.

So:

1. Wikileaks did, indeed, point out those wrong doings, as part of publishing specific evidence to back-up journalist's claims about wrong-doings reported in the papers. They have not published anything outside of that.

2. Even if the allegations Glenn quoted amounted to the entire scandalous part of the dossier, I'd hardly describe these as "very few" or even "few" incidents of questionable activity. The US government interfering in the justice system of TWO foreign powers in an attempt to COVER UP kidnapping, torture, and unlawful death is a MAJOR wrong, as is condoning torture when administered by our allies. Lying in order to justify a war is a MAJOR wrong.

Do I really need to continue? Handwaving doesn't make these "very few" incidents of "questionable" activity. These are extremely serious issues that deserve public discussion - and in a sane world, these allegations would result in imprisonments of Prime Ministers and Presidents. In a sane world, our media wouldn't bury the stories for fear that its corporate masters would not get the subsidies, government contracts, and licenses they need to remain in business. In a sane world, you'd be outraged.

Re:I placed a demand with paypal.

[McTickles]

In France it is illegal to refuse to sell something based solely on "I don't like them". You have to base you refusal to sell on a legal problem that a court of law could approve of.

Amazon defends Paedophilia longer than Wikileaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it interesting that Amazon quite genuinely publicly defended a Paedophilia how-to guidebook longer than Wikileaks? I'm surprised no one else seems to be talking about this in all the discussions I've seen so far on Wikileaks being dropped.

Though the author claimed it did no wrong, and was about 'loving children', reports stated it went so far as to discuss how to create custom condoms for use with children, that's a far cry from innocent intent, but an attack on the innocent.

"Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable," it stated.

And yet the single biggest defender of the right to true free speech this century, perhaps even ever, is dumped from their servers quicker than 'TSA for dummies, a terrorists guide' would be.

Wells Fargo harassment as well

[r7]

Not just Paypal but Wells Fargo as well. When I heard about Paypal and Amazon I went to the wikileaks website to make a donation. Not only was my charge denied but they put a hold on my card! Talk about harassment. It's bad enough when your own government breaks the law, worse when vendors decide to run a protection racket when they disagree with a customer's purchases/donations.

Re:Sauce for the gander

[nospam007]

Not much. The US embassy did illegal video-surveillance in the street where the embassy is located, we were told that 20 US nukes are 30 miles from here and the Prime-minister was 'shocked' according to his own words, but he's a Christian-Socialist, they are easily shocked.