WikiLeaks To Sue Visa/MasterCard

An anonymous reader writes "After six months of financial blockade by Visa and MasterCard, during which they claim to have lost over $15,000,000 in donations, WikiLeaks and Datacell are filing a complaint against the two financial giants, with plans to litigate should the block not be lifted. WikiLeaks stated, 'On June 9th the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission.'"

Comments

PRICELESS

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"...for everything else..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzMN2c24Y1s

They were in breach with Visa and Mastercard terms

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact here is:
Someone in the US Government told Visa and Mastercard to get rid of this customer.
Visa and Mastercard get in touch with Datacells acquirer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquirer) and ask if this customer really is what it says it is, and if due dilligence is done. Actually, Visa and Mastercard demands that the acquirer visit every new customer, to verify that they really are a restaurant etc (which they obviously almost never do).
Datacell has told their acquirer that they accept payments for "datahosting" or something like that, but in fact their only business is collecting donations for Wikileaks. This is violation according to visa and mastercard rules. So datacell/wikileaks fucked up, easy as that. Now no other acquirer dear to accept them as a customer :)

Re:As well they should

[careysub]

And the alternative is? Communism? Nice idea, but it has been shown to fail by history...

Regulated capitalism, of course -- which has been shown by history to succeed far better than the unregulated sort.

I really can't do better to summarize that history than Elizabeth Warren:

Okay, a young country, George Washington is in his first term and we have a credit freeze. There is a financial panic. Every ten to fifteen years there is a financial panic in our history. Just look at it. And there is a big collapse, trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out, until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and we say we can do better than this. We don't have to go back to this type of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations. FDIC insurance. It is safe to put your money into banks. Glass-Steagall. Banks won't do crazy things. And some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis... some recessions but no crisis, no banks failing. No big crisis. Then what happens? We say that regulation is a pain, it's expensive, we don't need it. So we start pulling the threads out of regulatory fabric. And what is the first thing that happens with that? We get the S and L crisis. Seven hundred financial institutions fail. Ten years later what do we get? Long term capital management when we learn that when one thing collapses in the world that it collapse everywhere else. In the early two thousands, we get Enron which tells us that the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.

Ending most recently with the Great Recession of 2008, from which we have not yet recovered. (Oh yes, there was that extraordinary rescue by the government to prop up those brilliant innovative capitalist heroes, and to keep the Wall Street bonuses flowing. But no regulatory reform to speak of.)