Can they be stopped?
Icelandic IT company Datacell today said it will take legal action against Visa Europe and Mastercard in light of both companies decisions to cease processing payments associated with the WikiLeaks website.
Datacell said they will use legal mechanisms to try to force the card companies to resume accepting WikiLeaks payments immediately.
Datacell’s CEO Andreas Fink said that Visa should ‘just simply do their business where they are good at – transferring money’.
Visa Europe suspended the processing of WikiLeaks payments on Tuesday, stating that they wanted to determine whether the website ‘contravenes Visa operating rules’.
Mastercard also confirmed that it would cease WikiLeaks transfers ‘until the situation was resolved’.
At present, neither Mastercard nor Visa has commented on the threat of legal action from Datacell.
Since WikiLeaks released the first raft of US Embassy cables almost two weeks a go, a number of other companies have decided to stop working with the whistleblowing website.
US online payment processing giant Paypal cited ‘a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy’ as their reason for pulling the plug on WikiLeaks payments, stating that they would not deal with transfers for any site ’that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.’
Previously, EveryDNS.net, the company that provided WikiLeaks with its domain name also stopped dealing with the whistleblower website, citing ’multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks’ as the reason. They said that such attacks could ‘threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.’
In response to this WikiLeaks has been forced to change its main web address and begin relying on the 500 or so mirror sites that have begun to spring up across the Internet.
US-based server provider Amazon also withdrew their service, explaining on their website: ‘It’s clear that Wikileaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that Wikileaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.’
Last month WikiLeaks released an encrypted ’history insurance’ torrent file which is believed to contain – amongst other things – the US Embassy cables in full. It is understood that WikiLeaks will releae the encryption code to supporters in the event of a total Internet black-out, ensuring that all of the information is ‘dumped’ into the public domain.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Asange was remanded in custody yesterday and refused bail by a London court pending investigations into alleged sex crimes in Sweden.
Supporters of the website continue to claim that the charges against Mr Assange are politically motivated and may be part of a grander plan to see the Australian born journalist extradited to America to face trial.
These things are done in our names, and the name of protection of human rights. We voted fo these people and governments. Yet we are not allowed to donate to a cause We believe is protecting the rights of all people to access information.
Note that Amazon and other’s excuse that “it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that Wikileaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted” is factually challenged. Wikileaks has only released about 8 or 9 hundred of the 250,000 cables, and only those which have already been published or disclosed by newspapers around the world, and that they are carefully redacted.
Hallo, VISA / Mstercard!
I m very disapointed about Your actions towards Wikileaks, so my actions are closing my bank accounts VISA card forever. I ll inform my friends about what is real VISA services about.
Sutch ugly way to limit customers ability to do the job is very disapointing act against customers without any warning.
You are UNTRUSTED company in my eyses that limits their customers freedom for donations and payments.
Thanks for Wikileaks that showed the whole world what is real democrasy USA having today- violant acts against humanity.
There is some ways to take action just now:
- Delete your Paypal, your Visa your Mastercard Accounts.. and tell them why.
- Donate money on older ways(postal for example)
…any more? Maybe someone else can continue this list
I THINK IT’S TIME WE ALL TAKE ACTION. WE WILL NOT BE SHUT DOWN; WE WILL NOT BE MADE SILLENT. WE DESERVE FREEDOM OF SPEACH AND WE DESERVE TO KNOW THE TRUTH. IN THE END, ALL THIS WORLD IS MADE ON OUR BACKS SO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW WHAT’S IN IT…EVERYTHING THAT IS IN IT. LET’S STOP TAKING AND CHATTING AND MAKE THIS HAPPEN. WIKILEAKS IS YOU AND ME…
Maybe these companies are scared. Isn’t it interesting that all of a sudden global corporates have a concience. They are probably hiding just as many secrets as the US .mil & .gov
Preventing to make donations to a European based organization to a European Bank Account from a European Creditcard is the unacceptable an ILLEGAL for CreditCard Company. If these companies think it IS illilgal under European Law, then FIRST make your case incl WHAT European Laws are violated. If these companies refer to USA law, then CLEARLY these USA based companies should be denied having any activities in Europe. I WANT TO DECIDE WHO I WANT TO SUPPORT, Not MasterCard and VISA. As a consequence I have closed my MasterCard and VISA accounts and may also close my AMEX Card and call on ALL European citizens to close their USA dictated Credit Cards and demand from European banks to organize an NON-US card. I rather use a Chinese or Russian Card.
Put all those credit company thieves in prison where they belong. They hold me captive, time for them to do some time.
In response to this statement…
“US online payment processing giant Paypal cited ‘a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy’ as their reason for pulling the plug on WikiLeaks payments, stating that they would not deal with transfers for any site ’that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.’”
Then why is it that “paypal” has no problems with allowing the world’s “largest” copyright infringement community “warez-bb.org” to thrive for years, with donations made through paypal?
This to me is clearly a political pressure.
Do you mean the 1500 or so mirror sites of Wikileaks (growing by the hour) rather than 500?
HAHA lol yah thats funny really funny that puny company is gonna force a billion dollar private company to take its payments like it has to lol visa can do watever tehy wnat they could shut down operations tommorw if they wanted they arent a basic human right dummies
Very good to have some action!!
let them feel they are wrong!
Simply idiotic. and visa and mc hail from the USA, they should know innocent till guilty. you can still use them for illegal gambling oversees. only gambling I do is publishers clearing house.
Or VISA will continues down.
Just goes to show you how free we really are…NOT AT ALL…push the government far enough and you can test it for yourself.
I predict that Asange has an accident while in custody or shortly thereafter, I also predict that it will be un-explainable or be some off the wall rational…I sincerely hope this will not be the case but if it is, I would implore all humanitarians to stand up say enough is enough and figure out ways to take action!!!!!
Great news.
I fully agree with this.
These companies should just go about their business. Leave the judgment of what is legal or illegal to the courts.