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Another company to BOYCOTT: Paypal

Krop | 04.12.2010 10:14 | Other Press | Social Struggles | World

This adds to Amazon who also cut ties earlier this week.

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The online payments processor, PayPal, says it has cut access for donations to the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

PayPal said its payment service cannot be used for activities "that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity".

Wikileaks' latest releases - of US diplomatic cables - has caused considerable embarrassment to the US and its allies, correspondents say.

PayPal cuts Wikileaks access for donations
Wikileaks homepage - 3 December 2010 Wikileaks took donations through PayPal
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Wikileaks Revelations

The online payments processor, PayPal, says it has cut access for donations to the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

PayPal said its payment service cannot be used for activities "that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity".

Wikileaks' latest releases - of US diplomatic cables - has caused considerable embarrassment to the US and its allies, correspondents say.

It has been forced to change its web address after sustained cyber attacks.

In a statement, US-based PayPal said donations could no longer be made to Wikileaks because of "a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy"

Earlier, the company providing Wikileaks with its domain name, EveryDNS.net, cut off service because the domain wikileaks.org had become the target of "multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks".

The company said: "These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites."

Wikileaks later reappeared using a Swiss web address.

It had earlier turned to the online store Amazon to host its site but the company ended the agreement on Wednesday - a move welcomed by US officials.

Amazon said Wikileaks had failed to adhere to its terms of service.

"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," Amazon said on its website.

Krop
- Homepage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11917891

Comments

Hide the following 6 comments

erm

04.12.2010 11:00

maybe it would be easier just to create a list of shops i could shop at?

BoycottCapitalismToday

boycott?

04.12.2010 11:38

The title: 'another' company to boycott shows the uselessness of boycott strategies.
Practically they achieve virtually nothing. The 'worst ethically' companies are just the most successful at squeezing profit out of us. If a boycott got really successful, another company would step up into its place. Fundamentally nothing changes.
That's why, rather than boycotting the worst excesses of capitalism, we need to fight back at the point of production. Where we work, in other words. We need to get over the liberal idea - implied by a tactic of boycotting - that capitalism can be 'ethical'.
Boycott's are also alienating to loads of people - including me, an anarchist - because they further deprive an already exploited working class. We are told by advocates of ethical boycotts that we can't do x or y, and instead we must go without or buy the normally more expensive equivalent.
We've got to unite and fight as a class, not mess about with this pointless liberalism stuff. Especially at a time when class struggle seems in resurgence, it is madness for radicals to waste this opportunity by promoting boycotts of this or that company.

Of course taking part in boycotts doesn't mean you can't also help in the class struggle, but the former is a pointless strategy which just makes our lives as working class people that little bit worse, where the latter is a vehicle for improving all of our lives in the here and now, countering prejudice and ultimately creating a revolutionary transformation of society.

I'm bored, ok.

class

hmm

04.12.2010 12:04

while i agree with it not being "the" most useful tactic in a class struggle, given the choice between Auschwitz produced clothes and those produced by a fair trade co-operative, I think I know what my choice would be.

Krop

Wikileaks needs to decentralise

04.12.2010 15:20

Wikileaks is pissing off some very powerful and nasty people. They seriously need a decentralisation strategy to make them less vulnerable to attack.

Don't ask me how the technical details would work though, maybe other people have some ideas?

anon

Boycotts are great for awareness raising and personal satisfaction...

04.12.2010 15:26

... but politically they rarely achieve anything unless they really go mainstream.

Face it, over 99% of people won't even hear there is a boycott, let alone agree with it enough to participate.

And probably pretty much every large company out there is boycotted by some group for something or other.

So, I appreciate the sentiment, and yes, Paypal are total scum, most people know that, but practically I'm not sure this is useful.

As a concrete suggestion, how about finding out who are the top people at Paypal in this country and target them personally? The new government is supposed to be all about personal responsibility so let's put that into practice! We want names, pictures and addresses!

anon

You have a choice! Dump 'em.

04.12.2010 17:36

There is absolutely no reason why anyone has to support companies like PayPal and Amazon which clearly have placed themselves on the side of the scum-of-the-earth.

Simple as that.
I have cancelled both accounts.

And here is a different way to donate money to WikiLeaks without those a*-holes.

Donate to Wikileaks:
 http://213.251.145.96/support.html

ninetto