A trend of Disassociation with Wikileaks

Wikileaks was launched in 2006 as a non-profit organization that publishes anonymous submissions of secret, classified, and private media. The publisher has been both criticized and praised. While the site has won awards such at The Economist's 2008 New Media Award and Amnesty International's 2009 UK Media Award, journalists have criticized the amount of documents released at one time without analyzing them, and Amnesty International has been displeased with Wikileaks's lack of censoring civilians' names who are working with governments.

While Wikileaks has always had its share of disapproval, now companies who were once associated with the site are backing down due to the increased amount of press the site has been receiving. PayPal, the internet money-transfer site, was the first to break away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. The site claimed the permanent restriction of use on the account was due to a violation of its usage policy that services ''cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.'' Soon after, the banking unit of the Swiss post office, Post Finance, separated itself from Wikileaks, by closing Assange's account because he claimed falsely to have resided in Geneva when he opened the account. Visa Europe Ltd. and MasterCard Inc. similarly broke off transactions, citing that Wikileaks may have disobeyed their policies. While MasterCard and Visa Europe are only suspending the accounts for the time being, PayPal has irreversibly banned the site and its founder.


What may be the most interesting break is that of Amazon with the site. The electronic commerce company ended its service with Wikileaks on similar to grounds of those with other companies, citing terms of use violations, but the break allegedly only came about after Amazon received a telephone call from the staff of the Senate Committee on homeland Security.

Former federal prosecutor and Miami, Florida-based Holland & Knight partner Greg Baldwin says that these companies have no legal obligations to Wikileaks. There are also no ground for Wikileaks to file suspicious activity reports (SAR). He states that public accusations may be enough to justify if there was ''any independent reason to suspect that either one engaged in suspicious financial transactions that indicate some criminal activity, but to file a SAR simply because WikiLeaks is publicly accused of maybe having violated some unspecified law, or because Assange is accused of rape in Sweden? In my opinion, absolutely not.''