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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.'"
Paypal did the same to cryptome.org, however they later reactivated the account. However, now this is "official" announcement on their blog, so I'm not sure it will happen this time.
I guess leaking secrets and wrongdoing is all ok until it's about you or your country.
"most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years "
While it's true that paypal generates animosity for some, I still think that the above statement requires a source before putting it in the article summary like it's a fact.
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.
So, journalism is only journalism when you approve of the content? Does that extend to all press or is this just your special "lex wikileaks"? Freedom of the press, yes or no?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Wikileaks is at war with your country now? Did you just declare the "War against Freedom of the Press"(TM)? Would fit in well with the War on Terrorism(TM) and the War on Drugs(TM).
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.
(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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Actually, the US has laws against funding terrorist organizations, and is moving to try to put Wikileaks on that list. So there may be either fear on the part of the businesses, or else behind-the-scenes pressure (a "friendly warning" from the FBI for instance) to do so.
At the same time, I can't fault Paypal for their actions. I used to donate to UNICEF, but I stopped when it was revealed that a sizable portion of money from them was being used to fund "summer camps" like the Wafa Idris, Ayyat al-Akhras and Dalal Mughrabi summer camps; these are named after suicide bombing terrorists and places where nothing but hate and racism is taught to children.
I dunno if you've noticed lately but:
A. The government is taking down domain names without warrants
B. The government is pressuring hosts to remove services
C. The government is encouraging if not mandating ISP to throttle bit torrents
D. The government is tracking US citizens Via their Credit cards, telephone conversations, Internet traffic and cellphones without warrants.
E. All sorts of other nefarious things we aren't aware of yet...
Seriously, this is turning into a bad Oliver Stone movie.
You know, I never thought about how oppressed we really were until your post on this commercial, advertising-supported Web site cleared it up for me.
Grow up and get some perspective.
oh geee !!! now i see the error of my ways ..
so, if we were back in slavery days, and slave in a plantation owners' farm, and talking at night in the log cabin that the plantation owner stuffed us into, while eating the food that plantation owner had given us, it would be totally wrong if i said 'hey, we are slaves here, we have no freedom' ??
would you say, 'you know, i never thought about how oppressed we really were until your talk in this slaveowner-sponsored log cabin, eating this slave-owner sponsored meal', in that sarcastic manner ?
wake up and dont be an idiot.
Read radical news here
If the US moves Wikileaks on the list of terrorist organizations, I move the US on my list of fascist nations.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
If the government threatened to shut down your business because you were supporting Wikileaks, you would probably cave too. The real issue here, as always, is government pressure and the power of the state.
What in high heavens has the ego of Assange to do with anything? You are just taking part in the good old character assassination campaign. They got material, they published the material, they are journalists. Freedom of press exists outside of your personal stamp of approval - thank god.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
So what is the problem then with publishing documents that are basically just "gossip"? All harmless, isn't it? You can't have it both ways.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Which is it? Are these companies totally gutless? Unable to recognize the positive publicity they could spin from this? Or - more likely - have they been put under back-room pressure by governmental officials? If so, they should publish *that* through Wikileaks.
The accounts were terminated, because Wikileaks violated their terms of service. Specifically "encouraging illegal activity". Of course the material is illegal - lots of it is classified, and whoever leaked it violated the law. That's kind of the point. Whistleblowing is always against some regulation, be it corporate or governmental. Whistleblowing to expose corrupt, unethical or simply improper practices nonetheless remains important, and should be supported.
In the current round of Wikileaks stuff, I haven't heard of any major bombshells. However, the sheer mass of classified materials points to improper governmental secrecy. There is no reason for most of this stuff to be classified in any way. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson named fourteen points for preserving international peace. His very first point includes the statement: "...there shall be no private international understanding of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
>IT IS A DEMOCRACY
yeah, i mean, come on, we have TWICE as many political parties as the soviet union did
all we have to do is vote for the guy who isn't a corrupt asshole, and everything will be fine
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.
I spent ten years of my life as a "real" journalist in several major US media markets. The primary difference between the news "we" presented and what's being presented via Wikileaks is precisely that Wikileaks allows more or less unfiltered access to the source material. Ask yourself: do you really want someone else selecting what's fit for you to read? Trust me, having unfettered access to original sources, so that you can independently develop your own take on what's happening, is infinitely better for you -- and better for society -- than having the news dished out to you by a "professional" like me in my former incarnation.
What's happening to Wikileaks is astounding and should be scaring the living shit out of each and every one of you. They have been transformed into a "criminal" organization in the eyes of many members of the public and many members of the mainstream media inside of a week. From the beside-the-point rape case involving Julian Assange to the loss of hosting, DNS services and, now, the possibility to gain funding. That's how easy it was to get the job done.
I've been an observer of political life, professional and otherwise, for more than forty years. Never have I seen an assault on free speech like this one. It doesn't matter what your personal view is on the wisdom of exposing the day-to-day minutiae of realpolitik. Free speech -- and your right as citizens to live under an open government -- are under attack. I can only hope people will speak up to defend them.
"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."
There are lots of Paypal horror stories, and Paypal is clearly a bank that is not a bank which gives them way too much power to do whatever they like.
But come on Slashdot, you are clearly trolling your userbase... and I guess I responded.
Yes, and it's pretty hard to argue that documents written by state employees on behalf of their employer would fall under privacy.
It amounts to business correspondence. And you know perfectly well that the rape charges are almost certainly false, so stop with the mud-slinging already - it does nothing but makes the US look even more pathetic than it already does.
If he's innocent, and goes back to Sweden, there's a pretty good chance they'll deport him to the USA. They've been their lapdogs of late.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It's not just throwing out diplomatic cables. If that's all they needed to do, they wouldn't need a whole organization. They could just use Tor and the hundreds of other back channels by which data circulates on the internet. But consider all the other things that Wikileaks actually does besides distributing data:
These four tasks are absolutely indispensable. If some future Wikileaks copycat thinks that it's enough to dump out documents, then the world is really in trouble. Wikileaks doesn't get enough credit for all the work they do to make sure their leaking is done in a responsible way.
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.
There's a world of difference between "secrets and wrongdoing" and "privacy and discretion." Accused rapist Assange* asked for and then published what amounts to the private correspondence of American ambassadors... something that on a long enough timetable is made public as a route matter ANYWAY.
Wow, you are human slime, doing the establishment's job for it. I believe we call such a person a "useful idiot". Assange is accused of continuing to have sex with someone after a condom broke, someone who went out the next morning, bought him breakfast, and brought it back. You're a fucking evil piece of shite to actually even bring that into the conversation.
(*: If he's innocent, he can go back and defend himself. If he's innocent, he has little reason not to and a big scary reason to do so... namely, to clear his and wikileaks' names.)
You know what makes it scary? That the mere accusation is enough to convince many people that you've committed the crime. I sincerely fucking hope it happens to you, and soon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Geez, I still don't see why prosecutor Marianne Ny (email address: marianne.ny@aklagare.se ) didn't follow any of the standard judicial and prosecutorial procedures; maybe we should ALL contact her to see what's going on?"
"And what's up with Justice Skarhed? (email: anna.skarhed@justitiekanslern.se ) I mean, wasn't she investigating why prosecutor Maria Kjellstrand illegally released aspects of the Assange file to the Swedish tabloids?"
"And that Tableaux Software (headquartered in Seattle, along with Amazon, isn't that were Micro$oft's located???)?
If you support Tableaux's pulling their software license from WikiLeaks, then give them a shoutout for support the Corporate Fascist State."
(first email is management) cstolte@tableausoftware.com efink@tableausoftware.com jmackinlay@tableausoftware.com
If their efforts focused solely on releasing evidence of crimes and abuses of power, then I think they would be tolerated. But the vast majority of the material that's been released shows no evidence of any government abuses, so its release serves only to hurt U.S. diplomatic relations without actually shedding light on any crime. That's the issue here.
Releasing that stuff doesn't fight against injustice, it just makes it hard for U.S. diplomats to do their jobs if they can't speak candidly in private. That does a hell of a lot more to hurt U.S. diplomatic efforts than Al Qaeda blowing up a couple of our embassies in Africa. And while we have a right to know what's going on in our government, at some point that right is overridden by the need to keep other people in the dark, including our frenemies like Russia and China, and outright enemies such as Iran, North Korea, and yes, the Taliban. I guarantee you that all of them are right now working overtime reading through these communications.
It's one thing to target criminals, it's quite another to start throwing hand grenades into a crowded room because there might be a criminal in there. Well, Wikileaks has taken the hand-grenade approach to fighting injustice, and the good done by the scandals exposed is going to be outweighed by all the damage. That's turned the moderates against Assange. I don't think that Amazon or PayPal ditched him because he was a costly inconvenience- I think that the people in charge genuinely felt that they are genuinely against what he was doing.
"the vast majority of the material that's been released shows no evidence of any government abuses"
There's more on the "abuse" word than "plain illegal", specially with respect to politics. If there's really no government abuses, why all the airing? Can it be because at least some people found the data supportive of at least questionable practices? And if it's indeed questionable practices at least for somebody, how can't it be considered whistleblowering?
Well, I terminated both my account at PayPal and Amazon today
That's called voting with my feet
Think you guys in the US should watch out for your free speech rights; doesn't sound good when Library of Congress starts to block sites; sounds more like China to be honest.