Banks And Wikileaks

From The New York Times.


...Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that WikiLeaks may be doing things that are “inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye out for some shady businesses — like drug dealing and money laundering — and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy...

Assange still committed to publishing secret documents: mother

From Reuters.


"My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. This circumstance shall not shake them," said Assange, according to his mother who supplied the network with a written statement of her son's answer.

"If anything this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct."

WikiLeaks has provoked fury in Washington with its publications of secret U.S. cables and has vowed to make public

the 250,000 embassy documents it had obtained.

Assange is under arrest in Britain over sexual assault charges in Sweden.

Assange was also critical of the major finance companies who suspended payments to his WikiLeaks site.

"We now know that Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and others are instruments of U.S. foreign policy. It's not something we knew before," he said.

4chan rushes to WikiLeaks' defense, forces Swiss banking site offline (again)

From Arstechnica

The forces of Anonymous have taken aim at several companies who are refusing to do business with WikiLeaks. 4chan's hordes have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance, and other sites that have hindered the whistleblowing site's operations.

A self-styled spokesman for the group calling himself "Coldblood" has said that any website that's "bowing down to government pressure" is a target. PayPal ceased processing donations to the site, and PostFinance froze WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's account. The attacks are being performed under the Operation: Payback banner; Operation: Payback is the name the group is using in its long-running attacks on the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations involved with anti-piracy lawsuits.

The initial attacks against PayPal were substantially ineffective; the PayPal blog was taken offline, but the main PayPal site wasn't harmed. The attacks against PostFinance, however, have resulted in the bank's website being unavailable for more than 16 hours. It remains unavailable at the time of writing. The latest target is the site of the Swedish prosecutors in Assange's sexual misconduct trial. This too appears to be offline. Twitter has also been named as a future attack target, due to its censorship of the #wikileaks hashtag.

VISA, PayPal, and Amazon all Pentagon Puppets.

They have all cut off funding to Wikileaks.

I suggest all three should be avoided if possible. They will get what they deserve soon enough anyway though, when the whole financial system of the Western world collapses, which is just a few years away anyway.