Slashdot Mirror
Bank of America Cuts Off Wikileaks Transactions
Chaonici writes "The first actual bank to do so, Bank of America has decided that it will follow in the footsteps of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, and halt all its transactions that it believes are intended for WikiLeaks, including donations in support of the organization. 'This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.' Coincidentally, in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine, Julian Assange stated that he was in possession of the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, and that he planned to release information about a major bank early next year."
Ok, so it's time for a run on the bank.
Get in before the rush!
the war has begun (?)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If the government can declare something "illegal" and pressure private companies to not do business with a particular entity... does it really matter if they can "make no law" abridging freedom of speech? Isn't the first amendment completely worthless?
accepted any manner of shady transactions regarding
-Bernie Madoff
-mortgage derivatives
-selling mortgage securities without proper paperwork
The problem, anymore, is that banks and ISPs aren't content to just be carriers. They have to judge the content of your transactions, too.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It is clear then that Bank of America is an instrument of US foreign policy.
expandfairuse.org
his arrest was temporary and for show. nothing more.
not worth getting big guns out just for that. that was simply a practice run.
this drama won't end for years, in all probability.
and keeping it all alive is *exactly* what the big liars don't want.
btw, if I was a bofa customer, I'd pull all my funds out of their bank. if my bank pulls this shit, I'll definitely yank my account and transfer it all elsewhere. it will be a hassle but I'm fully willing to do it. (hint, its over 6 figures, too. that HURTS banks, if enough of us do that).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Though this isn't the best fit, I came across a quote by Thoreau in a short story called "Repent Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman that seems like a good fit for the whole thing in general so I thought I'd share.
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc.
In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves
on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men
can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads;
and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without _intending_ it, as God.
A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and _men_--serve the state with their consciences
also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and
they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Maybe Bank of Ireland would be willing to help out Wikileaks. They are so broke they are not really in a position to care about where the money is going to
I think, technically, he turned himself in to the UK police.
Which I think is a strategic move on his part. Once Sweden extradites him, in all likelihood, he can't be extradited *from* Sweden by another country (say, US). Note that he got bail in the UK despite basically being a nomad, and all he has to do is spend four hours during daylight hours and four hours during night hours at a friend's mansion. I suspect (and it is just a guess) that the reason is that he agreed not to fight extradition to Sweden. Note also that the criminal charges he faces in Sweden do not carry any mandatory jail time.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
If Federal regulators even SUSPECT you have been allowing terrorists to receive payment, you are subject to an audit with a cost of about 50 million dollars to support (you have to pay all of your people to deal with the audit instead of their normal job responsibilities). The fines and reprecussions are on top of that initial cost, and can include being barred from the FDIC, which basically shuts down a bank forever.
My guess is that bank of america merely has the inside scoup and wikileaks is about to be declared official terrorists.
"our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities ... inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments"
Shut up. You're a bank. Just move people's money around for them and don't try to have an opinion.
Having a hard drive of a B of A executive is hardly conclusive as to the banks safety. As far as we know, the contents might have been removed, etc - and it was sent in for repair.
Safety? Wikileaks isn't going to be releasing Bank of America's passwords or security information. If they release anything it's going to be about corruption, insider dealing, complicity in illegal activities etc. The concern isn't the bank's "safety" per se. It's that if shit falls on Bank of America, their share price will get hit, there might be legal investigations into wrong-doing... That sort of thing. And I don't know what sort of shape Bank of America is in - are they part of the general morass that US banking has sunk into over the last couple of years? If so, probably the last thing they need right now is investors getting out. A run on the bank by the public? That's not a first response to this. It's this hit on share price and investors that would be the immediate effect. Expect some emergency buying by non-neutral parties to keep share price up if Wikileaks comes out with anything juicy.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Assange / Wikileaks doesn't do business with Bank of America, and likely never has.
Bank of America did not close a bank account (like the swiss postbank) or terminated a payment processing contract (like Paypal, Visa and Mastercard), it stops transferring money to other banks. So anybody with a Bank of America account is no longer allowed to transfer his money to another bank account without "moral approval" of the BoA.
I am surprised that this hasn't led to more media coverage jet.
They deal with scum like Bernie maddoff and involved with some of the shadiest operations imaginable and they turn off the hose to THIS? banksters are the cancers of our society. When the revolution comes, there won't be enough brick layers to keep up with the wall building demand.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
When you close your account, be sure to note that it is because you have reasonable belief that Bank of America may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with your internal policies for a bank-customer relationship.
It does need to be a lesson to every organization though. Wikileaks / Assange will turn on you any second that they think they have something that they can use to feed their ego. You're not safe doing business with this guy
In order: 1. It's not a lesson to every organization. It's only a warning to ones that have been engaged in wrong-doing. 2. "Wikileaks / Assange" is not good terminology: Wikileaks is not synonymous with Julian Assange and the constant identification of the two with each other is a symptom of our media which simplifies everything to Hollywood plot-lines. We shouldn't perpetuate this. 3. Wikileaks has not "turned on" anyone because this has strong connotations of betrayal. When were Wikileaks and Bank of America ever partners in anything? 4. Why this business of "feeding the ego"? It seems a cheap way to try and invalidate an action by alleging a base motive to the person doing the action. If someone wants to "feed their ego", they're better off trolling innocents on Slashdot or getting a job in Airport security where they can boss people around, than taking on the US government. As a member of the public, I have an interest in knowing about wrong-doings committed by world governments or large corporations.
On a side note, I'm going to go hide that childhood picture of me dressed as a girl for halloween... I'd hate to see it end up on Wikileaks after the cleaning lady steals it.
Wikileaks isn't for people's personal foibles - it's about malfeasance by those in power.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
In Arizona, BoA is being charged with fraud.
http://foreclosureblues.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/arizona-attorney-general-charges-bank-of-america-with-mortgage-and-foreclosure-fraud-complaint-here/
So yes... my hope is that Wikileaks does right by the people and exposes this corrupt bank and its practices.
Banks are the number one enemy these days, and rightfully so. They could have actually helped stop the recession by helping homeowners with the mortgages.
This is crap, the banking world should have precisely 2 options:
1. they receive some kind of common carrier status, which means they will have to accept everyone as a customer and have to process everyone's transactions.
2. they can have the freedom to do business with whomever they like and maintain blacklists of payments they will not process, but that means they will become accomplishes if the transfer is part of some crime.
The only possible exception would be specific government regulation.
(assuming an uncorrupted government off course, in that case all bets are of)
They are known as MBNA in Europe (Bank of America took over MBNA, but kept the MBNA name in Europe because it is much better known than BoA), and they are in trouble with the Office of Fair Trading for their debt collection practices http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/dec/14/mbna-credit-card-debt-procedures
I smell duplicity.
I have been loving these articles, as it routes out the companies that obviously aren't aligned with supporting liberty, and I hate to use companies which don't espouse, or support in some way, the values I believe in. So all of these articles, and businesses, have saved me a lot of time. More so, I love the ones where some companies steps up to fill the void. Those are the companies I'll migrate my business, and my businesses business to.
Nothing like a little private and public sector cleansing!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
But it's really not funny that there doesn't seem to be an inch of daylight between government and big business.
And, no, it hasn't always been that way. There have been times historically the situation was similar, but it hasn't always been that way.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.'
Too bad Wikileaks is not an international drug running or firearms smuggling organization, they appear to be more befitting "internal policies".
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
"We will no longer process payments to them because they are not consistent with our policy for who we process payments to."
This tautology neatly covers the fact that Wikileaks has been charged with precisely zero crimes over Cablegate. These upstanding organizations all like to pretend that they are following the law, but they are actually taking the law into their own hands. I hope they get the shit sued out of them.
Yes, this is total crap. Just more evidence that the banking system is more corrupt than anyone ever imagined. I mean Visa and MasterCard were content to deal with the Canadian Pharmacy operation for a DECADE and now suddenly the financial institutions are ganging up on WikiLeaks of all things?
Remember guys. If you want to do something about this, your best bet is to support BitCoin, a peer to peer currency with a small but rapidly growing economy. A BitCoin is worth roughly 25 cents on the exchanges. The production BitCoin network needs your CPU or GPU time to grow stronger, so mosey on over and grab the distribution. It's MIT/X11 licensed.
I have been enough to America, to know that msot of the folk is highly prejudicied for a reason or another. I am always polite, and try to speak the local language as good as possible. But once people remark my french accent, it is game over. I get cold shoulder and so on. And pelase don't tell me that's because I am french : 1) I have colleague from other nationality which also got cold shoulder (Iran, Indian, Swiss, german, Spanish nationalities) 2) For TRULY polite people it would not matter which color or nationaly one is, by default people should be polite with people they don't know anything beyond the nationality.
Sure it is only a bunch of anecdotial story, and so no real evidence, but really I call bullshit on what you said. The US is not a country of polite people. Provide us evidence of it and maybe we'll all think our anecdotial evidence is only a sign we got bad luck. until then, all i have to answer you is : get real.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Have you ever been to America? They're some of the politest and most welcoming people you'll ever meet. The dichotomy between the decency of the people there, and the corruption of the government is inexplicable.
It's not just us. Visit Italy or Kampuchea or Nigeria, among others. The average guy practically anywhere is usually pretty decent, even if his government is unbelievably corrupt. Democracy can reduce the level of official corruption, but it's not a silver bullet, e.g., Italy or Louisiana.
FWIW, America's problem is its hypertrophied nationalism. People here identify so strongly with their idealized image of their country that when someone points out flaws or misdeeds by the government, they interpret it as a personal attack.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I imagine because they have lots of lawyers and money and he does not.
Move to a local Credit Union. Cheaper fees and much better service along with responsiveness. I did and Yes I have Direct Deposit, Online Banking with Bill Pay, far better interest on my savings and checking plus a much better rate on my credit card. Another advantage is that a credit union can not pull this kind of shit as the members cand and should review the leadership on a regular basis, then decide if they need replacement.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
And would that be because of BoA's recent behaviour with Wikileaks, or the fraud and corruption of which Wikileaks claims to have evidence?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
That will just make it illegal to send money to Bitcoin.
While I've taken a personal stance that sending money to Wikileaks via Bitcoin is a good thing, most of the people on the Bitcoin forums are against the idea and the lead developer wants to stay away from Wikileaks as long as he can. It is already causing grief for the Wikimedia Foundation, especially as Jimmy Wales ended up buying the domains for Wikileaks through a comedy of errors (via Wikia).
The nail in the coffin on the idea of using Bitcoin to send money to Wikileaks is that the Wikileaks guys don't want it either. If you set up an address for Wikileaks, they won't even take the bitcoins. I think they are foolish to do that, but that is their prerogative and not something you can force upon a group like this. Their main complaint is that they can't get the money out to pay their bills... something that is of a concern. You can easily exchange Bitcoins for Liberty Reserve Dollars, but getting your money out from LR Dollars isn't easy either and that seems to be the main sticking point.
Bitcoins certainly isn't ready to process tens of thousands of dollars in daily throughput to and from federal reserve notes... at least yet. There are some volunteers and interested parties trying to get that going, but it isn't there yet, and you certainly can't buy bitcoins with PayPal or a credit card at the moment unless you personally know somebody with a stack of bitcoins willing to sell them in a direct exchange.
About the only thing bitcoins are good for at the moment is to trade Dollars for Russian Rubles and the other way around. It works pretty good that way and I got at least a couple of Rubles via Bitcoin. You can also indirectly trade both currencies for Japanese Yen, although that market is still quite slow as there aren't many in Japan trading bitcoins at the moment. Somebody selling pounds might be a potential market that currently isn't being met either.
On a side note, I came to realize that there's no true alternative to US based credit card companies.
I'll be ditching my Mastercard soon. However, there are no real alternatives. Here in Europe there's the German EC debit card but it is only accepted in Germany, Switzerland and neighbouring regions.
This situation is actually more concerning than Oracle becoming arseholes over Java. Most likely, the US government can influence payments globally.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
It sure doesn't help. Neither does the overall level of apathy and lack of awareness of current events beyond the heavily filtered TV news sources.
The real killer, IMHO, is that we're so physically isolated by the oceans that relatively few Americans visit other developed countries to see how other people live. When I first spent a few months in western Europe, I felt like those Soviet soldiers in WW2 that Stalin subsequently purged because they had seen how well people lived in the West, contrary to Soviet propaganda.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You don't need Wikileaks or /. comments to see obvious evidence of fraud, corruption and criminal activity by BofA and all of the other big banks.
Municipal bond bid-rigging
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-24/bankers-rigging-municipal-contract-bids-admit-to-lying-to-cover-up-tracks.html
Failing to transfer mortgage notes into MBS trusts . . . but not keeping them on the balance sheets either? Hmmmmm.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/11/countrywide-routinely-failed-to-send-key-docs-to-mbs-trustees.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+(Economist's+View+(EconomistsView))
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/bofa-drags-balance-sheet-confidence-backward-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html
These are great because a senior BofA executive testified under oath that BofA routinely never trasnferred mortgage notes to the mortgage trusts when they were sold as "Mortgage Backed Securities" i.e. they were really "Nothing Backed Securities"
Now, the funny part is that BofA is Disavowing the testimony of its own executive.
http://www.bankinvestmentconsultant.com/news/bofa-mortgage-2670073-1.html?zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1
If you need any further evidence of fradu and corruption, "4closurefraud.com" also has a mountain of dirt and evidence of fraud, forgery and corruption bu BofA and the other the big banks.
Anyone still doing business with these scumbags is either completely apathetic to the idea of "voting with your dollars" as a form of social activism, or just a fool.
You'll notice that the US Government didn't really do *too* much to Assange after his prior leaks. Hell, he already leaked before and they didn't "shut 'em down". On the other hand, they shut the hell out of dozens of domains that pirates trademarked purses and stuff last month. If they can do that, why can't they do the same for something that supposedly "puts national security and lives at risk"? Right, because it doesn't and it didn't.
However, THIS time, he warns that he has pretty dire information about financial institutions and THEN shit suddenly hits the fan. The clear point here being that it's the FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS that are putting the screws to him.
The other half of the story is this... The banks gave out loans that they knew had very little chance of ever being repaid and then sold those bad loans off to the unwary as fast as they could. Legal does not equal ethical. Remember that, and you'll know why people are so pissed at the banks. If they were in it to make an ethical buck, then they could have still made those loans, kept the risk, then re-mortgaged people who were in trouble at more favorable (to the borrower), but less profitable terms (for the owner of the loan), which would have still made the banks (less) money AND kept people in their homes. Instead, the banks chose to foreclose, as that way they could charge the people they sold the bad loans to for administering the foreclosure, not have to worry about losing the principle or interest on the loans, and leaving borrowers bankrupt and homeless. Sure, the people who took those loans shouldn't have, but if only one party, ie the banks, had done the right thing at any step of the way, everyone could have still come out of this without it having been half as bad as it's been.
Even if the bank succeed in assassinating Julian Assange, WikiLeaks will release the documents to their mainstream press partners.
(Think about it. if he, as the public face of WikiLeaks, causes only a 1% drop in stock valuation, that's still billions of dollars out of the pocket of the banking community. The man's dead. He'll be a martyr, but a very dead one.
[The "rape trial" is obviously an attempt at character assassination. Rape as a crime is NEVER pursued so much as to cause extradition. Once the leak is done with, the charge will be done with...
{Julian Assange may be a prick and an egotistical asshole. For all I know he may even be guilty. Rape charges DON'T happen like that unless somebody with "mui dinero" is calling the shots.
(Think of what YOU could expect if your sister was the victim. Do you see the cops from the local precinct running to another country to capture somebody. Its not even a murder. That's what I'm saying.)}])
Now the question is how scared are these partners.
Do the Guardian, the New York Times and half a dozen other still retain enough editorial integrity not to knuckle under from the shit storm of advertising the banks are going to unleash defending their fictional record and fighting the truth of how nefarious, perfidious, greedy, grasping, manipulative, wanton crazed, depraved and devoid of human sensibility, their actions are.
Banks are definitely not charities.
They aren't even businesses.
They're banks.
They handle money, and money is the root of all evil.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.