Shortly before midnight on Friday evening, PayPal disabled WikiLeaks’ PayPal account.
Now WikiLeaks can no longer accept on-line donations through PayPal.
Anyone attempting to donate to Wikileaks on Saturday morning received the following message “this recipient is currently unable to receive money”
While Wikileaks is able to receive donations through other resources like mail and a Swiss credit card processor, PayPal was a more convenient method for many web-savvy users.
WikiLeaks redirected their PayPal link to the Wau Holland Foundation, a partner that supports the WikiLeak operations.
Read Write Web reports: In the latest in a series of blows to Wikileaks, PayPal says it will no longer support money transfers to the whistleblower site.
Robert Mackey of The Lede writes: The e-commerce Web site Amazon and the domain name company EasyDNS.Net both severed their ties to WikiLeaks during the course of this week. And now they are being joined by PayPal, the online payment service.
boingboing comments: The rationale seems more convincing (at least from PayPal's perspective) than Amazon's wheedling about rights and redaction. But the timing, at 11:29 p.m. EST on Friday evening, suggests they do know the decision is something to be buried, not boasted of.
The Wau Holland Foundation also released a statement that their PayPal account had also been disabled due to their “financial support to WikiLeaks.”
This was another financial blow to WikiLeaks since the Wau Holland Foundation has collected more than $1,000,000 for them.
Other companies, such as several ISPs have stopped support of WikiLeaks.
The wikileaks.com site shows a “Sorry! This site is not currently available.” graphic and the wikileaks.org URL returns a “Server not found” message.
Comments
A more interesting story about Pay Pal is that they do business with the file sharing sites like Oron, Filesonic and Rapidshare, dot com sites that make their money totally through stolen content uploads and downloads of Hollywood movies, video games, TV shows and pornography (a lot of that). These sites are in Europe and impervious to US copyright laws. Yet Pay Pal does not do business with the legitimate, legal adult internet sites. This is pure hypocrisy. Pay Pal supports copyright infringement by handling payments for file sharing memberships.
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