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

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.

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.

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.