PayPal Announces It Will No Longer Handle Wikileaks Donations

By Audrey Watters / December 3, 2010

In the latest in a series of blows to Wikileaks, PayPal says it will no longer support money transfers to the whistleblower site.

PayPal has posted a (late-night) statement to its website, saying: "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 its 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.

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.

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.

Although these companies have said that their terms of service forbid the support or facilitation of illegal activity, such pronouncements about Wikileaks are debatable. While it is a crime to leak classified information, receiving and publishing it is not.

Source: Read Write Web.
Link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paypal_announces_it_will_no_longer_handle_wikileak.php.