Wikileaks

I haven't commented on this one -- which, as Digby points out, is the most genuine political discussion we've had in this country in over a decade -- and now Digby, bless 'er, had done a great summation, so I don't have to.


There are definitely huge threats in the world. And they are coming from many directions --- terrorist violence, massive economic corruption, global warming, extremists of all sorts. What should be clear by now, however, is that the system by which we manage threats is failing. It seems to me that one thing we might want to do is start talking about that problem. This is an opportunity to do that.

I do want to mention this, however:

“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,” reads a statement on PayPal’s website. “We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”

Most of the over $1 million in contributions WikiLeaks has drawn in the last year have come through its PayPal account, which belongs to the Wau Holland Foundation, a German non-profit group that manages the bulk of WikiLeaks’ money.

Attempting to donate to Wau Holland though PayPal on Friday night produced the message “This recipient is currently unable to receive money.”

PayPal’s move comes amid mounting U.S. pressure against WikiLeaks over its cache of over 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. Struggling with denial-of-service attacks on its servers earlier this week, WikiLeaks moved to Amazon’s EC2 cloud-based data-storage service, only to be summarily booted off on Wednesday. Then on Thursday its domain-name service provider, EveryDNS, stopped resolving WikiLeaks.org, after the DNS provider was battered by the DoS attacks.

Isn't it reassuring to know that major corporations are working with our government to protect us from things they don't want us to know?

And here's Julian Assange himself.

As for my own stance -- well, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't like people trying to control what information I have access to, under any circumstances. I say this will full understanding that sometimes particular parts of government operations must be kept secret for the time being. When the Bush administration started classifying information that had been published years before, that broke it for me: someone needs to take away the government's ability to keep secrets, and I'm glad Assange is doing it.

As for the people calling for his assassination, trial for "treason" (excuse me? He's not an American) and the like -- well, read Digby.