Wikileaks Payback - Offensive and Defensive

[Magda Hassan]

There will be an appeal I hear but the court have also said they have 2 week to reinstate Wikileaks or big daily fines.

[Magda Hassan]

PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly Hosting Provider PRQ

PRQ, the infamous ISP created by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm of The Pirate Bay, has been nuked by PayPal. After a fruitful partnership lasting three years, PayPal decided to ruin their relationship with the so-called "bullet-proof" hoster by freezing the company's funds for up to 180 days. On PayPal's advice PRQ opened a second account to get by while the dispute was being sorted out, but then without warning PayPal seized those funds too.
While most webhosts go about their day to day business without most people knowing they even exist, Sweden's PRQ has a habit of making international headlines a few times every year.
The ISP, created in 2004 by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij of The Pirate Bay, usually hits the news due to their business strategy. PRQ's philosophy says that if a website is legal in Sweden, they will not only host it, but defend it to the end. That has made it a haven for controversial sites that are less welcome elsewhere.
Time and again PRQ's affiliation with The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing domains has seen the company raided, most recently during early October when authorities hunted down the operators ofTankafetast and Appbucket and took down dozens of sites in the process.
PRQ is known for respecting the privacy of its customers, even going as far as accepting cash in envelopes from website operators requiring the highest levels of protection. However, a decision just taken by PayPal might mean that this archaic method of payment becomes more popular in the months to come.
After targeting dozens of file-sharing, file-hosting and Usenet services in recent months, PayPal has just banned PRQ from its service and seized all its funds, not once but twice.
"First they froze our primary account without any prior notice we can't even receive funds to it," PRQ told TorrentFreak in a statement.
"After we contacted their support' they stated that the support could not help us, BUT the person who was responsible for our account should contact us within a couple of days."
As of today, PRQ are still awaiting that call, despite having a trading relationship with PayPal for the last three years.
PRQ told us that since PayPal is a big source of payments for the ISP they need to be able to process funds while their account is frozen. So the company asked PayPal for a solution.
"PayPal stated that we just had to open a new account to receive funds to until the primary account problem was resolved, and once it was resolved they would merge the two accounts," PRQ explained.
That all sounded simple enough, but "PayPal dispute" and "straightforward" aren't usually terms seen in the same sentence together, and this occasion was no different.
"So we started a second account, and that got frozen too so that we could not withdraw the funds, although we still can receive funds to the account," says PRQ.
Not content with freezing two accounts, last week PayPal sent an email stating that they will be keeping all funds in PRQ's primary account for up to 180 days to act as a reserve in case of any chargebacks. PRQ informs us that historically there have been almost none of those.
"That was it for us, that made us decide to discontinue PayPal forever. It's sad that PayPal decided to f*ck us after three years of service," PRQ concludes.
In the meantime PRQ is accepting Bitcoins and bank wire transfer while their Visa/Mastercard merchant account is being set up.
https://torrentfreak.com/paypal-bans-bit...rq-121224/

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful

WikiLeaks is a rare example of a newsgathering organisation that exposes the truth. Julian Assange is by no means alone.
By John Pilger Published 14 February 2013 8:39

Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world. They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard the limits of informed public debate.

These public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was given the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam war.

Like Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film director Ken Loach and others lost bail money in standing up for Assange. "The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets," Loach wrote to me. "Extradition via Sweden is more than likely . . . is it difficult to choose whom to support?"

No, it is not difficult.

In the NS last week, Jemima Khan ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on Wiki*Leaks's founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Loaches and Knightleys, and the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We are all "blinkered". We are all mindlessly "devoted". We are all "cultists". In the final words of her j'accuse, she describes Assange as "an Australian L Ron Hubbard". She must have known this would make a gratuitous headline, as indeed it did across the press in Australia.

I respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as the Palestinians. She supports the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am a judge, and my own film-making. But her attack on Assange is specious and plays to a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone.

Khan complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she "executive produced". Assange knew the film would be neither "nuanced" nor "fair" and "represent the truth", as Khan wrote, and that its very title, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America's hellholes. Having interviewed axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the "paranoid" Assange. Oscars all round.

The sum of Khan's and Gibney's attacks is that Ecuador granted him asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been declared an official "enemy" of a torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in official files, obtained under Freedom of Information, that betray Washington's "unprecedented" pursuit of him, together with the Australian government's abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.

Khan refers to a "long list" of Assange's "alienated and disaffected allies". Almost none was ever an ally. What is striking about most of these "allies" and Assange's haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they attribute to a man whose resilience and good humour under extreme pressure are evident to those he trusts.

Another on the "long list" is the lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill was paid from an advance on a book whose unauthorised manuscript was published by another "ally" without Assange's knowledge or permission. When Assange moved his legal defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain's leading human rights lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to the Australian government, warning how the US deliberately "synchronised" its extradition demands with pending cases and that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and personal danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London in person that she had known few cases as shocking as this.

It is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest danger of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be despatched under a secret arrangement with Washington; and it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America, not the courts, that will make this decision.

Khan is rightly concerned about a "resolution" of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.

As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian in August 2012, ". . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .

"The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to their investigation? What are they afraid of?"

[Magda Hassan]

WikiLeaks claims victory in Iceland court case over Visa financial blockade




By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, April 25, 6:36 AM


LONDON WikiLeaks said Wednesday it has secured a victory in Iceland's Supreme Court against the financial blockade imposed by Visa and MasterCard on donations for the secret-spilling site.
Visa and MasterCard were among half a dozen major U.S. financial firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks following its decision to begin publishing about 250,000 U.S. State Department cables in late 2010.





Josh Hicks 10:35 AM ET

WikiLeaks has claimed that the financial blockade led to a 95 percent fall in revenue.
It said Wednesday that Iceland's Supreme Court had upheld a district court's decision that MasterCard's local partner, Valitor, had illegally terminated its contract with WikiLeaks' payment processer, DataCell.
The court warned Valitor it would be fined 800,000 Icelandic krona ($6,824) per day if the gateway to WikiLeaks donations is not reopened within 15 days, WikiLeaks said. It added that the court's decision will bolster similar legal actions it is taking elsewhere, such as in Denmark against a Danish subcontractor for Visa.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who remains holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he is seeking asylum called the decision a victory for free speech.
"We thank the Icelandic people for showing that they will not be bullied by powerful Washington-backed financial services companies like Visa," he said in a statement. "And we send out a warning to the other companies involved in this blockade: you're next."
Assange is currently fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct, and he has long complained of funding difficulties.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/w...story.html