Ok, so Paypal was told by a high-level Federal agency that Wikileaks was illegal. Freezing the account seems like the safe response to that.<p>I'm sure, by now, Paypal has figured out that Wikileaks isn't illegal - based on all the calls by lawmakers to ban it, if nothing else. Have they restored the account yet?
Seems like an awful lot of feigned shock about paypal.<p>Paypal has a long history of closing account for arbitrary reasons or for no apparant reason at all. This is <i>especially</i> true of accounts for taking donations (rather than ones selling physical products). If you Google around you can find dozens of people complaining about closed accounts who were taking donations for completely innocuous projects.<p>By comparison, "because the gov't told us it was illegal" seems like a pretty solid reason. The cost of just paying lawyers to figure out if Wikileaks might actually be breaking any laws surely costs more than Paypal is likely to make in transaction fees.
Interestingly, DDoS attacks against Wikileaks can only delay dissemination of information a little bit. DDoS attacks against PayPal, on the other hand, can be effective in costing them real money, for every hour they are down.<p>If I were attacking them, I would target the APIs that merchants use instead of the main site. The main site has probably been DDoSed before, APIs are a subtler target. I imagine a successful attack there would have a broader and deeper impact.<p>Also, have browsers been used for DDoS before? I imagine with the popularity Wikileaks has, you can ask people to keep a page open if they want to participate, and share that page on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook. The page would repeatedly create requests loading the target urls in an iframe or as a script tag.<p>In this approach one would have to get rid of the referrer header, I guess. So open the urls using SSL. The SSL handshake would cause additional load.<p>Not sure how effective would that be compared to a traditional botnet that can delay TCP and SSL handshakes; things browsers can't do.
PayPal should have fought this instead of panicking and
complying with the State Department. If it's true their
exact words to PayPal were that Wikileaks was
performing "illegal activities", then they are liars. There
is nothing illegal about Wikileaks. In fact, PayPal should
have stood their ground.
I'm completely against making WL into a terrorist organization. But that's where we are headed -- or something very close to it. They're not publishers -- at least not in any normal sense I can fathom -- but they are certainly not terrorists either.<p>My point being: if PayPal and others want to play hardball and refuse to shut down their payments because WL aren't criminals, the other side will just up the ante by making them criminals. This is a no-win situation for PayPal and other vendors associated with this CF.<p>Ironically, the vendors who are voluntarily shutting off WL are probably doing the most to help the cause in the long term by not pushing the matter. WL supporters should really hope for a long spell of lowering the volume and everybody behaving like adults for a while. Probably won't happen, though.
Am I the only one for whom this seems like a case of mass fail in reading comprehenson? Did anyone actually read the letter?<p>Nowhere in the letter does the State Department say that what Wikileaks is doing is illegal. They use ambiguous and misleading language to imply that but in effect they just keep stating that the original leaker broke the law. If anything, by omission of a direct claim of illegality, this letter is confirmation by the State Department that what Wikileaks did was in fact, TOTALLY LEGAL.<p>Of course, given that PayPal routinely suspends accounts for absolutely no reason at all we can hardly be surprised if they suspend this one. They've always done this and nobody expects more of them.
2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction wouldn't buy a lot of loyalty from me, either. If the Internet cheering squad sent them six figures, that would just about cover what it cost to ring legal and schedule, but not actually run, a meeting to decide what to do about this. Legal would, predictably, say that Paypal was not in the business of taking on risk for people whose business model is trolling Joe Lieberman.
Reading about these stories the last few days, it occurs to me the Wikileaks strategy is a major factor here. They have not been selective and released <i>actual</i> stuff that rises to the level of true whistle blowing. While the things released (thus far) might be <i>interesting</i> in the way a tabloid article about a celebrity is interesting, they are hardly at the level of the Pentagon Papers. The world has not learned any deep dark secrets about how the US government operates. Given this situation, when the government leans on PayPal and Amazon, there's nothing for them to hold on to and say, "We're going to fight this because we think the public has a right to know X". X needs to be something pretty important to take that position and all the heat it brings.
Does anyone know if it is possible to get a freedom of information act inquiry to find out if the state department really did advise/request PayPal to do this?
I don't have anything against Paypal or any of the other companies who blocked Wikileaks. I guess in a perfect world it is bad, but if Paypal (and whoever else) weren't to do it and the US government <i>did</i> get angry then who'd be affected? That's right, every other customer (including me).<p>The problem isn't with these companies (although I suspect a lot of this is about how everyone already "hates" Paypal) it's with the governments. It saddens me that these companies are being targeted, people should be shouting at the government(s) putting pressure on the companies, not DDoSing the companies.<p>I'd rather wikileaks had their account closed than the service I receive be affected, however selfish that may be.
when has paypal been known for defending their users? or even going the extra mile to talk and try to figure it out themselves? ... it's not only a nightmare to work with them as developer, it's also one to have them as a general service providers.
So:<p>1) Paypal lied to the public.
2) The State dept. effectively ordered content off the web, not unlike China.
3) Paypal hasn't restored service to Wikileaks, even though it's a legal organization.
As an entrepreneur, this is exactly the kind of situation I'm worried about: a service provider (PayPal, Amazon, etc.) shutting me down based on nothing more than somebody in the government disapproving of some of the content on my site.
<i>“One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you, this case isn’t anything different.”</i><p>What a non-answer.