Swedish Pirate Party Presses Charges Against Banks For WikiLeaks Blockade

davecb writes "Rick Falkvinge reports today that the Swedish Pirate Party has laid charges against at least Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal before the Finansinspektionen for refusing to pass on money owed to WikiLeaks. The overseer of bank licenses notes (in translation) that 'The law states, that if there aren't legal grounds to deny a payment service, then it must be processed.'"

Comments

Excellent.

[SeaFox]

I look forward to seeing Paypal get a taste of having to follow rules.

Re:Excellent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations are people too, Sweden has just unilaterally declared war on an American citizen, our drones will be there and filled with democracy and liberty for the Swedish people soon.

Re:Excellent.

[Mitreya]

I look forward to seeing Paypal get a taste of having to follow rules.

They do need to be reigned in.

But perhaps Visa and Mastercard need to be put in their place even more. I can usually avoid PayPal in my everyday life, but Visa and Mastercard together pretty much control the world of online purchases. They cannot be allowed pick and choose who gets the payment and who doesn't.

Aren't there any equivalent US laws? Or is no one in US interested in prosecuting?

Re:Excellent.

[Fluffeh]

In case anyone else was wondering what Finansinspektionen was, the following is taken from wikipedia:

Finansinspektionen (FI; Financial Supervisory Authority in English) is the Swedish government agency responsible for financial regulation in Sweden. It is responsible for the oversight, regulation and authorisation of financial markets and their participants. The agency falls under the Swedish Ministry of Finance and regulates all organisations that provide financial services in Sweden.

Re:Excellent.

[rolfwind]

Aren't there any equivalent US laws? Or is no one in US interested in prosecuting?

Who do you think pushed to get Wikileaks payments blocked? The US Government.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11945875

Re:Excellent.

[TapeCutter]

Thet're not normal businesses, they are global financial institutions with the power to economically strangle small to medium businesses anywhere on the planet, they get special treatment by governments and society, in return they get special responsibilities. Global telecommunications are the same deal, people would soon start screaming if ISP's were selectively blocking internet banking transactions.

Re:Excellent.

[shentino]

Who wants to bet that Visa and Mastercard will follow the telecoms into getting retroactive immunity?

Re:Excellent.

[CodeBuster]

VISA and MasterCard aren't normal businesses, they're banks. If you don't understand why banks are special and need to be regulated, I suggest you pick up an economics textbook, I recommend Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw, and read the chapter(s) covering the monetary system, banking and the growth of money and inflation. As for "relevant international organizations" there basically are none, apart from powerful nation states, because the power to regulate commerce has always rested implicitly, and when necessary explicitly, upon the economic and military might of those nations that can enforce their wills upon other potential or competing authorities. It's no accident after all that the value of any currency throughout history has always been closely associated with the economic and military might of the entity issuing it and their ability to standardize and enforce its use.

Re:Excellent.

[Sabriel]

From what I understand, the New York Times also reported (some of) Manning's leaks. Are you claiming the New York Times broke the law?

There was also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

Are you claiming that the New York Times should not have released the Pentagon Papers and in fact did so illegally?

Re:Excellent.

[1u3hr]

Yes there are US Laws. Trouble is Wikileaks broke them.

Bullshit they did. American military who released the information may have a case to answer, not those who distributed it. Otherwise, why isn't, for example, the New York Times having its bank accounts frozen? It published "Wikileaks" stories on its front page.

The whole fucking world isn't legally beholden to the US government, and US laws, and the US is just being a bully to use tactics like this to strike out at people who embarrassed it.

Re:Excellent.

[dropadrop]

Good selective quoting there. The bit you missed ("you agree to enforce everyone-else's rules in areas where they have sovereignty") makes clear that the blasphemy law thing is a straw man.

I can only give it a two out of five, tho. Way too transparent.

Well from a Europeans point of view I can't see how you could accept blocking all payments from an organization that has not had charges raised against it. I understand it follows the same path of locking up people without a trial and even ordering execution of citizens etc, but that sounds like something China or Russia would be doing (so not that far fetched).

So what you are saying is that if the US decides to go against all common sense and due procedure, we should abide to your laws even when no charges have been raised... Actually it seems that the whole case would be based on what is considered as "press", so I guess it would fit your whole current view on the law and freedom that you would retroactively make a definition that Wikileaks does not fill or require all press organizations to get a yearly governmental approval to be covered by the legal protection "press entities" are entitled to.

Re:Excellent.

[dkleinsc]

Place blame on exactly who's shoulders it belongs:
- Barack Obama (D) made it national policy to aggressively prosecute whistleblowers of all stripes (including Bradley Manning), and proudly supported the effort to cut off funding of Wikileaks despite the demonstrable fact that the organization has not been convicted or blamed for any crimes in any court of law.
- Joe Lieberman (I) did the actual organizing of all the payment processors to cut off payments.
- Lest you think this was all the Democrats' idea, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, and quite a few other prominent Republicans fully supported these moves. Probably because it made their guys look bad too.

Make no mistake about it: There was absolutely nothing legal about what the US government did to Wikileaks, but there was little to no opposition within the government. Julian Assange had a point during his extradition trial when he argued that the United States could not be trusted to follow its own laws. The trouble, of course, was that the UK and Sweden were happy to bend over when the US asked them to, and it was Ecuador with the cajones to stand up to them.

Re:Excellent.

[cdrudge]

Who wants to bet that Visa and Mastercard will follow the telecoms into getting retroactive immunity?

I may be wrong, but I don't think Congress can grant retroactive immunity for a corporation's operation in another country. They may grant immunity for US operations, but if they chose to operate in a foreign country they are subject to that foreign country's laws.

Potentially this could put Paypal, Visa, and MasterCard between a rock and a hard place.

here here!

[hguorbray]

There was no legal basis for these payment processors to refuse to transfer payments to wikileaks -who had not and have not (as far as I know) been identified as a terrorist or organized crime group....

the payment processors were just sucking up to the corporatist powers and should be punished for refusing to allow legal commerce and monetary transactions -of course they were probably leaned on at the time by the state department or someone and threatened with sanctions or aiding and abetting or giving comfort or some BS

the ultimate end to this would be refusing to send donations to the EFF, ALCU, greenpeace, PETA (OK I know the last two are borderline hippie/batshit crazy) and other radical and democratic groups....so as not to rock the plutocratic ship of state.

-I'm just sayin'

Re:here here!

[BlueStrat]

The situation with the Pentagon Papers is not identical. The Pentagon Papers were a multi-volume book about the Vietnam War. They had all the context needed to make sense. They also showed us lots of things we didn't know. This means that a responsibly-handled publication was in the public interest. What about either War did this tell us that we didn't know? How can a dump of totally un-redacted cables be considered responsible?.

I was a teenager at the time and remember. The PP were a series of classified reports requested by SoD Robert McNamara that were published by the NYT in a series of news articles over a period of time.

Both the PP and the WL cables were classified material. What form the classified material is in (reports, book, etc) was and is immaterial, as are any subjective views of how informative or "responsible" they may or may not be. If one is legal, so must the other be. The law does not change depending on whether the government favors or disfavors a particular instance. At least, it should not if the government respects and obeys the rule of law. If the government is free to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants for whatever reasons it may choose, that's a tyranny.

The government tried at that time to prevent the NYT from publishing the PP and were planning to prosecute Sheehan and possibly editors at the NYT. Much as now, the propaganda and inflammatory accusations against the NYT and Sheehan by the government and those supporting the government's position abounded. The courts did not allow the government to prevent publication nor prosecute Sheehan or the others.

I'm certain that the US government has not moved against WL in the legal venue in a court of law precisely because they know the courts would have to completely reverse themselves on a major already-decided fundamental legal question, and their chances of that happening are remote at best.

Strat

Re:Sweden doesn't have a judiciary?

[gstoddart]

I am fairly certain no one had any legal grounds to deny payments to Wikileaks. How could they?

Well, the legal grounds amount to some nice men in dark suits told Visa that since wikileaks were terrorists, they could possibly run into some unspecified trouble if they paid that money.

Make no mistake about it, it was pressure applied to these companies to stop payment, and VISA may find themselves in the middle of two governments who differ in their interpretation of what is required here.

One side will say they were funding terrorism, and the money needs to be withheld (if not seized), and the other side will say there isn't sufficient legal basis to withhold.

Bring on the popcorn.

Journalists

[Anonymous Coward]

Good journalists report what governments don't like reported. Wikileaks did nothing more than journalism. It was a good thing, it gave strength to the people wanting democracy in the African Spring.

The attacks on Wikileaks and on Assange (no I don't accept the rape charges are anything other than malicious) amount to attacks on journalism.

Re:Unkown Lamer, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Dollars to doughnuts finansinspektionen will conclude that no one in sweden has done anything wrong...

Since Wikileaks has its headquarters in Sweden (specifically BECAUSE if its strong journalistic shield laws), and no doubt tried to collect the money there, one end of the transaction is under Sweedish banking law. No doubt some of their contributors are also making donations in Sweden, putting the entirety of those transactions under Swedish law.

Pirate Party

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice that again it takes the Pirate Party to stand up against these bullies. And still there are people that cannot see further than the name, or assert that it's just people "wanting to download stuff for free".

Hats off to the Swedish Pirate Party!

Re:Sweden doesn't have a judiciary?

[gnurfed]

Manning (or so the prosecutors say) leaked the information, not Wikileaks. That was illegal under US law, and the US has jurisdiction. Wikileaks, on the other hand, is not and has never been a US organisation, and are thus not under US jurisdiction. They are registered in Sweden, and I think their infrastructure is placed there as well, so the legality of whatever they have on their servers is a matter of Swedish law. After all, Sweden is a sovereign country, where US laws doesn't apply.

Just like the hosting...

[bradley13]

The US government was (and is) certainly a major force here. The trail is even easier to follow, if you look at the hosting. After the Wikileaks servers were initially overwhelmed by DDOS attacks, they moved to Amazon EC2. On 29 November 2010, Ms. Clinton stated that the US would "aggressively" go after Wikileaks. Two days later, on 1 December 2010, Amazon threw Wikileaks off of EC2.

According to the fine print in the Amazon Terms-and-Conditions, they can do this for any reason or no reason. Which is not unusual, but it *is* unusual to see a company actually make use of such terms. It is surely coincidental that, at that point in time, Amazon was completing for some pretty big cloud-service contracts with the federal government.