Paypal no longer supporting WikiLeaks

[Mark]

Paypal no longer supporting WikiLeaks

PayPal have announced that they are no longer supporting WikiLeaks, and that they will not handle Wikileaks donations. This has come in a list of long blows to WikiLeaks.

PayPal posted a late night statement on their website, stating:

PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action.

PayPal's announcement follows Wikileaks' loss of their DNS server today and its ousting from Amazon Web Services earlier this week. This comes on the heels of the recent release by Wikileaks of another round of leaked documents - 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.

PayPal isn't the only way to donate to Wikileaks. You can make a bank transfer or send money directly by mail. But certainly sending money online via PayPal has become one of the easiest and most routine ways for folks to make all sorts of online donations.

PayPal's announcement will certainly result in a loss of donation dollars for Wikileaks. But it also marks an important symbolic loss for the organization as well, as it represents yet another major private tech company that has closed its doors to Wikileaks. In addition to those who've refused to provide Wikileaks with hosting and financial services, the visualization company Tableau Software also expunged all Wikileaks content from its site.

It's not the first time Wikileaks has run into trouble with PayPal either, as the organization had its account temporarily frozen earlier this year.

[Drumm]

PayPal has a tendency to stop donations like this, like the people who made SSLStrip. I don't know how they warrant such things, is there some kind of guide? Or do they go more along the lines of "You're breaking American law, so you can't have money!"

[Mark]

Along the lines of "we're a holes and charge you wayyyy too much tax on everything you transfer".

[bigsharn]

Bigsharn likes the above post

[Mark]

Just a quick update, Julian Assange has now been released on bail.