Paypal has been reported closing Wikileaks' account through which it obtained donations. This is unacceptable and arbitrary. This is derogatory towards the associations and the thousands of common people who cared enough of their Freedom of Speech to spend money on this. This is why I have decided that if they don’t want Wikileaks' money, they do not want mine either, and I have closed my account with them.

Here is what they wrote me:

  <blockquote>

Dear Carlo Piana,

We are sorry that you have decided to close your PayPal account. With millions of members in dozens of countries and regions across the globe, PayPal is continually improving and expanding its award-winning services.

PayPal is the world’s leading online money transaction service for individuals, businesses and merchants. From customized shopping carts and ATM debit cards to one-click purchases, PayPal offers individual and business solutions that are time-saving, secure, cost-effective and easy-to-use.

Should you decide you want to have a PayPal account again in the future, visit https://www.paypal.com/it and follow the few easy steps to open a new account.
 

Meanwhile, as also Visa and Mastercard have been reported fiddling with Wikileaks' account without having received any court order compelling them to do so — and this is tantamount to stealing other people’s money if they have blocked incoming payments — I have decided that in protest they will not have the chunk of my not irrelevant Chrsitmas shopping, as I will only use other payments means. If they don’t listent to people’s voice, they will listen the language of money.

At the same rate, I find that coordinated attacks in the form of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), website hijacking and defacements are to be avoided as they use illegal actions to react to illegal actions. While there is nothing wrong in trying to boycott by coordinating service requests at a certain point in time in order to clog a service in protest, using malformed Internet calls, botnets, zombies, viruses and similar non-genuine systems to overload the capacity of one’s network is an unacceptable abuse and does no good to the case of Freedom of Speech. We liberals (and libertarians) are very restrictive when measuring the legality of our acts, because there is a clear conflict of interests that can bias our judgment. The end very seldom justifies the means, we don’t react to violence with violence, as those who fight us invariably do.

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  <a href="/taxonomy/term/62">Free Speech</a>






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  <a href="/taxonomy/term/18">Free software, digital liberties</a>