Comments

1
Visa, MasterCard, and Amazon have no duty to work with WikiLeaks. They don't have to do business with them. They DO have the right to have their own websites, up, though. These DDoS people are idiots - they're breaking the law, and the people they are attacking have not.
2
They ARE aiding and abetting censorship in a most draconian manner Reymont. That said - this is affecting regular people and their transactions which is NOT cool.
3
Ugh, it's REALLY hard not to post some facile example that illustrates the perils of the whole "eye for an eye" thing.

Also the "fucking shit up for people on the internet is not fundamentally different from fucking things up for people in real life, just easier and more anonymous" thing.

But fuck it, let's all throw trash cans through Starbucks' windows!
4
It's not censorship! Amazon.com ALSO doesn't sell...oh I don't know....nazi poop action figures! Because they don't WANT to! And they don't have to! That's not censorship - the people who make shitty toys can try to sell them at some other store.

Visa won't process payments for dirty porn, or probably dirty bombs - they're free to sell to whoever they want.

These fucktards don't know what censorship IS. They're just throwing rocks at people they don't like, and that's fucking despicable.
5
The LOIC people are dumb. It takes no political will or understanding to DDOS a website. In this Anon is nothing more than a facile lynch-mob going after targets that bear only the slightest relationship to attempts to censor Wikileaks.

These people are doing more harm than good and embarass us all.
6
Eh, I think it's pretty amusing.

Plus, showing us how vulnerable our precious internet is is character-building.
7
You can still get Nazi poop action figures from Spencer's, so I'm not sweating this shit.
8
Anon's day-to-day activities can be distasteful, but I support them when they push back at those squelching free speech.
9
It is an easy way to recognize the bourgeois: they are the ones for whom inconvenience and incivility are worse crimes than censorship and war.
10
It is censorship, not because Amazon et al are willingly boycotting Wikileaks but because the US is clearly and obviously strongarming them into it.

But I'm just curious what people like Reymont think Wikileaks should do when companies illegally freeze their assets because the government illegally asks them to. As the post reminds us, Wikileaks is not under suspicion of any crime, nor is there any suspicion of them being terrorists. The government simply has no right doing to Wikileaks what it is doing. And what are the rest of us supposed to do in the face of tyranny?
11
I'm finding that US news outlets are reporting extremely incomplete, incorrect and misleading stories about WikiLeaks (big surprise). I'd recommend everyone on this thread to go read at http://www.spiegel.de
12
Ah, that's http://www.spiegel.de/international for the English version.

Ich liebe die Deutsche Sprache!
13
@guspasho - What assets have Visa, Mastercard, and Amazon seized from WikiLeaks?
14
@ Reymont: A Swiss bank has frozen 31 thousand euros and their DNS provider has confiscated their domain name. That's what I'm aware of. Paypal has also frozen their account which may contain funds, but I don't know.

Put yourself in their shoes. There are only a handful of revenue streams for most people to donate money to them through. When the government successfully strongarms all of them, what are you supposed to do? Roll over and die?

Just like many other political arguments of the last ten years, it just comes down to you either think the government should have the power to do whatever it wants, or you don't. And I don't think the government should have this kind of power to persecute someone it doesn't like.
15
@guspasho - But...this article isn't ABOUT a swiss bank. None of the comments above are about a swiss bank. What THE FUCK have Visa and Mastercard stolen from WikiLeaks? Why THE FUCK should they be forced to do business with them?
16
@ Reymont, neither is the article about Visa and Mastercard. I've answered several of your questions but I'm still waiting for an answer to my original one. When the government lawlessly persecutes innocent people and innocent groups, what do you do?

Visa and Mastercard were not forced to do business with Wikileaks, nobody forced them to do business with Wikileaks, but the government is forcing them to stop doing business with Wikileaks. The question is: Why THE FUCK should they be forced to stop doing business with them?
17
@guspasho: You are factually inaccurate in SO many ways. I'll just point out one. They didn't have their domain "stolen" from them. Their previous DNS service (everydns.net) which was a free DNS service was getting DDOS by an unknown group. Being the target of a DDOS violated the ToS that EveryDNS.net had established with Wikileaks. It was also threatening to bring down their total ability to act as a DNS service and potentially take down all of the other domains they were hosting. So they made the pragmatic decision to cease hosting Wikileaks. They terminated a business relationship with Wikileaks. Wikileaks still owns their domain name and their hosting is being migrated to a different DNS service.
18
Visa and Mastercard are being attacked by these DDoS retards, in an attempt to force them to do business with WikiLeaks, @guspasho. I didn't think I need to say that again, because that's the whole topic of the article and thread.
19
So Anthony, pretty much everyone thinks you've written a very poorly constructed article. The ends justify the means? How original. Your arguement is the same one used to justify terrorist actions the world over. Call your mom and tell her how proud you are of yourself.

Please wait...

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