Then came the backlash of Wikileaks releases. You could almost hear the breathing from the collective black plastic helmet of the US government.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded Wikileaks as "an attack on America's foreign policy interests," and claiming their release posed "real risks to real people." Senator Joe Lieberman introduced legislation known as the SHIELD Act to make any publication of any classified data illegal (I should re-emphasize this includes publishing, not just the act of leaking). House Representative Peter King (R-NY), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, claimed the Wikileaks releases were "treason" (though I'm not quite sure how as Julian Assange is Australian, perhaps he meant whoever released the documents?). Other political types, such as Sarah Palin, referred to Assange as "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands." She also asks why Assange has not been "pursued with the same urgency as we pursue al Qaeda leaders" - though if he were, I guess he would be safe for a while. (It's been nine years since 9/11, right, Osama?)
Commercial backlash soon followed. Amazon removed Wikileaks's contents from their servers. EveryDNS, hosting company of the wikileaks.org domain, soon followed suit. This effectively shut down Wikileaks for about a day and a half, until they moved to the new wikileaks.ch domain (and gained hundreds of mirrors afterwards). Though these companies were most likely pressured by the US government to do so, their actions were pretty clear cut - it is illegal to transfer classified data over unclassified networks. Amazon and EveryDNS pulled the documents in a pretty big CYA move.
Then, in very questionable fashion, Paypal blocked all transfers of money to Wikileaks, cutting off the site's primary source of donations. Soon after, Mastercard followed suit, refusing to process all payments directed toward Wikileaks. Visa also hopped on this train a day later. A couple weeks later, Bank of America cut off its customers from donating as well. Oh and, this just in: Apple has removed the Wikileaks iPhone app from the App Store.
It is easy to assume the US government pressured these companies into this decision, as they treat Wikileaks essentially like a terrorist organization, and thus those who support the site financially become complicit in terrorism. However, there has been no direct claim from either the companies nor the government as to whether or not this is the case. Most claim Wikileaks was inconsistent with "internal policies" or "terms of service," however these companies had no interest in blocking payments when the Afghanistan or Iraq cables were released. Interesting for sure.
If it was government pressure though, this sets a terrible precedent for the future of the Internet, media organizations, and the supposed "free market." While in jail for supposed sex crimes in Sweden, Julian Assange called the financial companies' bluffs, stating, "We now know that Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal are instruments of US foreign policy." Despite the outcry of private citizens and civil rights groups against such actions, the government did everything within its power to stop Wikileaks. As stated by one blogger, "The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us, 'You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.'"
Burning questions:
- Why wasn't there the same vigor in taking down Wikileaks when hundreds of thousands of documents concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were released?
- Why was there no democratic due process to determine what laws Wikileaks had broken (if any) before any action was taken?
- How did the government so easily convince American ISPs to cut off a website?
- Similarly, how were financial companies swayed so easily as well?
- Shouldn't the market have dictated both moves instead? (If the market didn't like Wikileaks, they wouldn't have gone to the site, nor donated to its cause.)
- Is the government reserving more power than even a tin-foil-hat-wearing libertarian like myself thought they had?
More to come in Episode 6... I mean, the next article.
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