Paypal shut my account today because my business donated money to wikileaks

It is most likely something else going on with the account. You need to remember the brilliant creation of Max Levchin was actually the fraud detection algorithms. The easy way to think about it is, any "uncommon" or "uncharacteristic" account activity will generate some degree of weight towards flagging or even locking the account.

If donations, or even transfers, of size X are uncommon for the account, then the fraud detection algorithms try to limit the risks. This might result in a call from paypal (happened to me), a lock on the account, the account being completely frozen or any of a number of different risk mitigation methods.

In short, this one example proves nothing about wikileaks.

What's going on is that posting "paypal disabled my account" gets more karma than posting "paypal could disable your account".

There's a complete lack of detail in this story, and the wikileaks bit almost seems like an aside looking to cash in on some of the wikileaks sympathy.

It's humorous how bitchy people are about PayPal -- do this sort of stuff with your bank and see how that turns out. Long before wikileaks, and before 9/11, banking and financial regulations have been very tight.

Every single payment system on the planet has to abide by the laws of the countries that they are operating in. Anti-money laundering regulations, in particular, apply to every organization that does money transfers of any sort.

Further still, many of the recipients of PayPal cash got paid via credit card. For those who don't know this, when you pay someone with a credit card they normally don't get a penny for 60 days or so. PayPal, in letting you withdraw cash against credit card payments, is essentially fronting you a loan with the CC receipts as the collateral, though obviously they have risk if you have significant fraud or chargebacks. It's that element that so many fail to understand.

Under US law, you can not donate to whomever you wish. Sending money to organizations flagged as terrorist organizations is illegal. (Not that the US has officially declared the wikileaks org to be a terrorist organization.)

They finally let me close mine today. Had an "instant" payment pending for the past week for some reason. Good riddance.

>What did I say HN? What did I say?

You sound indignant, like no one believed you -- but you have like 80 up votes on that comment. Am I missing something?

What do you mean, you have complete freedom! Why, all you have to do is simply to start your own international payment processing system, convince enough people to use it, and voila; convenient money-transfer freedom by your own rules! Oh, what's that you say? You don't have a multimillionaire co-founding CEO to force your idea on the masses by partnering with existing internet monopolies? Well, then obviously you just need to work harder for your liberty (erm, I mean, it's not as if you're actually entitled to political expression or anything—that's for people with money).