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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

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You missed this part of the article:

"Update: After talking to Bedier backstage, he clarified that the State Department did not directly talk to PayPal"

This is starting to look like an attempt at ass covering that backfired badly.

So if the letter was indeed sent to wikileaks, but used as a justification for locking their account, how on earth did the letter end up at Paypal to begin with?

This is looking very, very fishy.

Wikileaks released the letter publicly.

> Paypal has figured out that Wikileaks isn't illegal - based on all the calls by lawmakers to ban it

Congress-critters fighting over a microphone are not a useful source of information about the state of the law.

It's actually fairly common for congress critters to say "this shows that we need a law" when there already is such a law. In some cases, they then use the current incident to pass a completly different law.

Getting on the US government's bad side when you are in a highly regulated industry is NEVER a good idea. It'd be a quixotic crusade that'd just draw Paypal into the line of fire. For example, there are probably 50 FinReg statutes alone that an aspiring Eliot Spitzer 2.0 could throw at them given sufficient prodding by the federales.

That's presumably why all those cell phone companies handed over all your calls to the police without a warrant.

Only one called their lawyers to ask if it was legal.

Great comparison.

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.

It is not. Freezing an account is a safe response to legal documents that have legal force, from a court requesting that this be done Some vague threat by an unnamed bureaucrat should be treated as nothing more than political pressure.

Paypal was told nothing directly. Please read the updated text.

Yeah, I updated the title to reflect the update on TC.

What happens to the money if an account is frozen or turned off?

They unwind all the transactions and give the money to the people that originally sent money to Wikileaks, right?

No, they keep the money until whatever dispute there is, is settled.

Typically they hold on to it for half a year and then pay it out to the merchant.

>Have they restored the account yet?

Are you kidding me? That Machiavellian sanity-grinder gave Notch, a legitimate indie developer selling a game about digging through dirt, Hell on Earth just to get his money.

PayPal doing the right thing, snorts I'll sprout wings and shave my eyebrows off first.

I'd sooner trust the IRS to do right by me than PayPal.

Disclosure: My first entrepreneurial effort was annihilated in concert by UPS, PayPal, and eBay.

oh please don't bring the Notch stuff into this. FYI they were entirely justified with what they did. I administrate the Minecraft forums, there were (and still are) many legitimate complaints from people who paid for the game but never got access because minecraft.net is very poorly built[1]. When his account received millions of dollars in a tiny period of time with numerous complaints do you really think any legitimate company would just give him the money?

What they did in his situation was entirely justified and I'd personally suggest it was exactly what they should have done. I'm sure there are many times when Paypal have done wrong, but this really isn't one of them.

[1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=91042

Also: Everyone talks about them "freezing" his account or stealing his money, when they did no such thing. They're simply requiring him to keep a float in his Paypal account to cover chargebacks, and due to the amount of transactions he gets, that float has to be an unusually large amount.

They're requiring that now. At the time, they froze the account, allowing money in but no withdrawals.

At a point in time when it was unclear to Paypal whether or not all of the money was fraudulently obtained and was going to be charged back, that action seems perfectly reasonable.

I still don't have access. I emailed someone, got no response, so I gave up on it.

hey :-) Send an email to Daniel (daniel@mojang.com) and he should sort you out. If not send me an email (sam@redstonewire.com) and when he's next online I'll poke him into helping you out.

Just last week someone asked on HN "what are the legal consequences of donating to an organization that is branded a "terrorist organization"? Can you be punished retroactively?"

I replied that yes, you can, and you should not expect rationality or good faith from these people, only savagery. I was down-voted into oblivion. This filled me with confidence, so I donated that very day. Later that afternoon, Paypal caved. Evidently I was the last straw. ;)

Ya the same here. I donated when Paypal caved and then I donated again when MasterCard caved. Between that and my vocal opposition to the new TSA policies I'm pretty sure I'm on every list the government has at this point /tinfoil hat.

I'm with you man, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. I cast my fate to the wind years ago. And by the way, I think the use of tin foil is highly underrated and needlessly ridiculed.

What I want to know is, why should harmless fuzz-balls like us have to worry about anything in life? We are but simple people, minding our own business in honest toil, needing only our daily ration of beer and bread. Now if I could just write that with an Irish accent.

I assume you can still donate to NORAID with your mastercard?

All of us little old England are so glad we have never experienced any terrorist attacks before 911

I'm too young to have remembered, but seems Noraid was a largely US-funded charity alleged to have paid for weapons for use by republican groups in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID

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