If you’ve been listening to the news lately you can hardly have missed the furore caused by WikiLeaks publication of 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables.
This has led to a worldwide embarrassment for everyone from government and embassy employees to high profile businesses people and even royalty. The site has suffered loss of it’s Domain Name Service (which allows you to find their site on the Internet), denial of service attacks on their website and the WikiLeaks site being kicked off their hosting by Amazon.
The latest blow is loss of PayPal as a means of fund raising. A short statement on the PayPal blog says “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.”
Wikileak’s actions have opened up some interesting questions. Whilst it’s undoubtedly against the law to leak classified information it’s unclear exactly what crime receiving and publishing the information is. Amazon carefully explain in their statement why they’re no longer prepared to host the Wikileak site, PayPal give no explanation.
The internet is a powerful phenomenon, and the Wikileak story demonstrates how unregulated it is which is exactly how it has been designed to be. What happens when there’s a desire to control the information published on the Internet is a problem that countries and governments have yet to solve. Although the Wikileak site is now unreachable from many countries it can still be viewed from others, on alternative website hosting, and how the story will end has yet to be seen.
Edited to add: Following the publication of the statement it appears that the PayPal blog is redirecting to a text only format of the statement. However the full blog is still accessible on a secure server at https://www.thepaypalblog.com/
6 Responses
I have a suspicion that most companies that Wikileaks use are going to follow the same line. Many of them engage in some dubious practices that governments can use as leverage. For Amazon that has to do with not collecting sales tax from every state (even here in Texas where they are legally required to because they run a warehouse in-state, they don’t). I won’t even start with PayPal.
Paypal’s blog http://www.thepaypalblog.com has been down for most of the day due to a DOSS attack.
https://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/tis-the-season-of-ddos-wikileaks-editio/
The site is now just displaying a single page.
My guess is that this attack could last a few days.
Ahhhhh…. Poor paypal..
Wikileaks got attacked because of planning to reveal banking fraud.
Politicians are puppets, everyone knows they say some ‘candid’ things. Politicians regularly steal from the taxpayer (fiddle expenses), don’t insist on audited accounts from EU, accept bribes (Blair + Ecclestone) and so on.
What’s most interesting about Wikileaks is the public figure boss having an interpol arrest warrant out for him for two alleged sex crimes that had already been dismissed. Two partners complained about consensual sex when they found out they were one night stands and knew each other. That’s another big pile of doo-doo, bankers clearly exerting their control over Interpol.
Business Insider has been following the story:
https://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-bank-of-america-2010-11
https://www.businessinsider.com/and-now-paypal-is-cutting-off-wikileaks-2010-12
https://www.businessinsider.com/julian-assange-sex-crimes-2010-12
God knows what will happen next, no one can be sure that “PayPal permanently restrict Wikileaks account” can do a good job, but it’s better than nothing, so let’s expect some thing new and surprise will come soon.
ITN News told viewers how easy it was to download the program from the internet which is coursing the cyber attacks on Paypal which is a bit irrespouncable by ITN, as it will encourage others to do the same. Paypal should stay out of politics even if the US goverment tells them to stop accepting payment for Wikileaks so they can avoid a public backlash. Its not Paypals fight, a public backlash-cyber attack on Paypal will only affect sellers who use Paypal and who really gives a f**k about US goverment cables anyway, we already known what a bunch of egocentric tossers they are.