RLENT
Veteran Expediter
"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’. [Rlent Editorial Comment: Apparently users aren't the only ones who can't understand Visa's user agreement]
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.’ [Rlent Editorial Comment: They haven't yet released all 250,000 cables .... just another attempt at pushing the "official" USG line ....
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 release 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."
Original article:
Icelandic IT firm to sue Visa & Mastercard over WikiLeaks cut-off
