Comment by asdfasdghasdf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdfasdghasdf | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think we have established such a precedent. Wikileaks is still up. You can still donate to them. Visa and Mastercard have decided not to allow them as a customer, but I know of no evidence that says it was ordered by the US government (that's not to say it wasn't).

Wikileaks's claim that this 'blockade' has shut them down is just based on the fact that they haven't been receiving a lot of donations since the embassy cable leak (http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html). Of course, they haven't done anything interesting since then, either. Look at their own charts, and you see that their income is heavily correlated with major releases (etc. Collateral Murder in April, Embassy cables in December) and their current donations don't look that far removed from, say, September or May 2010.

Even their own financial statements (http://wauland.de/files/2010_Transparenzbericht-Projekt04_de...) say that most of their money came wire transfer (which is still possible and fully legal). This is definitely more an issue of people not wanting to donate than it is being not able to. Obviously, the best way to raise more funds would be to do more high-profile work; WikiLeaks is choosing to shut down all their high profile work.

You say the government shut them down, but in fact they shut themselves down, as your parent comment mentions. They shut down their super-useful, award-winning site (eventually to be put back up as a read-only archive at http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks) and re-purposed themselves entirely to hyping up the five things they got from Brad Manning. Now, they're out of money, they're out of juicy Brad Manning leaks, they haven't even been accepting anything new since they shut themselves down, and so they're gonna drum up their little government-conspiracy thing that they do very, very well, to try to raise some more money.

So your argument is that the arrest and ongoing prosecution of Assange(sp?), the shutdown of services from paypal++, visa, master card, bank of america, Western Union and Amazon had pretty much no noticeable effect on donations, was not the result of a coordinated effort by the US government and the real reason donations are down is because they haven't released any more leaks?

sounds entirely plausible to me. would you like to buy a bridge?

++Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Wau Holland Foundation, mentioned that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks, before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account.

You're obviously exaggerating what I said for effect, but that's the gist of it, yeah.

I didn't mention his sex crime accusations, and I only said that there's no actual evidence that the US government directly influenced Visa and Mastercard. Surely it's possible Visa, MasterCard, etc. made their decisions on their own, but I honestly don't know, and wouldn't be surprised if it was a "favor."

But for the rest, the numbers speak for themselves, and it's pretty much common sense. Everytime there's major leak, they got a ton of money. They've haven't been publishing, they're not getting attention, nobody's donating to them. From their own charts, they made more in post-blockade February '11 than they did in pre-blockade Sep '10. Again, most of their 2010 money... more than 50% of all their money came through channels that are still totally available.

It is true that they were taking in more with PayPal than through transfers before December. There's obviously no way to know how much of potential paypal donations were lost versus replaced by wire donations, but it remains that most of their money in 2010 came from transfers. In December, about 2/3s of it came from transfers. The steep drop-off from December to January in their charts has nothing to do with the blockade, right? They got 398,365.60EUR through wire transfer in December and (estimating from their charts) about 20K in January. Is that not clearly just interest from the embassy cables dying down?

They're claiming they've lost out on "tens of millions of pounds" because of this 'blockade.' That is a ridiculous number, considering they made just more than 1M last year. Somehow they expected to average more than twice that every month? Despite not publishing any new sources of material? Or even accepting any new material? Ridiculous.

This is an organization that accepted credit card payments for 46 DAYS and they're coming on like Visa and Mastercard are ruining them?

Everything Wikileaks has done since Assange started talking with Brad Manning has been hyped-up, conspiracy-theory, drama-queen publicity stunt and this 'financial blockade' is no exception.

Tell me more about this bridge you have, though.

heh. Thats a good response, thanks.

I do wonder whether transfers work if your bank account has been frozen?

They are drama queen-ish though, I agree. Luckily that doesn't stop them from being a journalistic entity.

As they mention on their Banking Blockade site, the Treasury found no reason to put them on their blacklist, and nobody has frozen their bank accounts.

I agree they're a 'journalistic entity' -- whatever that means. I was only rebuffing when you said "We have just established a precedent that the US government can unilaterally decide to shutdown any journalistic entity that reports news it doesn't like."

Their webpage is still up. Assange is still making cheesy videos where he tells you how terrible the world is. It's still legal for you to donate. Nobody has accused them of committing any crime. A handful of US companies decided not to do business with them, but with only circumstantial evidence of government influence. There were certainly no judges involved.

Wikileaks shut themselves down to new submissions a year and a half ago when they started pushing Brad Manning leaks, and they've done nothing but hype up and politicize those leaks since. Now they're whining that nobody's donating to a whistleblower site that doesn't accept whistleblowing. They shut themselves down.

In no way did the US government unilaterally decide to shut anyone down. They're still allowed to operate, and just drama-queening that they're shut down. If the government were to try to shut down a news organization just because it didn't agree with them, there definitely would be a gigantic backlash.

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