PayPal Suspends WikiLeaks Account

From the official PayPal blog:

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. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.

What a load of crap. I’ve never had a favorable impression of PayPal over the years for a number of reason. This takes their chicken f-ckery to a new level. WikiLeaks has never been found guilty of violating a single U.S. law. PayPal is clearly caving under unfair pressure (doubt they resisted anyway) from veteran Chicken F-cker Joe Liberman. At least in Amazon’s case they were able to argue it was a clear violation of their ToS:

AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” 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.

Of course even in that case, questions can be raised - would they refuse to sell books published with text from the leaked documents? Or refuse web hosting to institutions like The New York Times, The Guardian based on the same excuse?

Don’t forget to read the comments.