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PayPal: "State Department Said It Was Illegal"
- jeremyjarvis 16y agoYeah, and they've got no ulterior motives? due process anyone?
- dtf 16y agoYou don't want to piss off the State Department. They can make things very difficult you in the future. At least, I suspect this might be the strategic thinking of PayPal, Amazon, EveryDNS, MasterCard, Visa, most national media organizations and any other business large enough to care.
- Seth_Kriticos 16y agoNobody doubts that. Insisting on due process (wait for an official subpoena form a court) would be the legally and ethically correct thing, especially if you want to avoid bad reputation. But wikileaks is pissing off an incredible amount of people, and it's probably a bad idea to stand in the crossfire, so their reaction to try getting out of the story is understandable. IMO the argumentation of PayPal is pathetic. They did not even have the balls to admit that they just wanted to stay out of trouble and trying to shift the blame to someone else. On the other hand, from what I know they don't have much reputation left anyway, so it's a bit of a moot point.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoDue process is a requirement that the government respect the rights due a person or organization under the law and isn't really relevant here, as the government isn't taking direct action and a private business has the right to not do business with anyone they want. Also, a subpoena is a written order to compel testimony or evidence. I think you mean a court order.
- Dylan16807 16y agoThe idea is that the government should be using due process instead of applying unofficial pressure, and better behavior for the businesses would be to insist on that.
- paulshort 16y ago"You don't want to piss off the State Department. They can make things very difficult you in the future." That is the real problem here. Even though the SD can't, or hasn't yet figured out how to charge Wikileaks with a criminal offense, they wield their power as a bullying tactic to get what they want. "Comply, or else ..." is an abuse of power and is exactly what wikileaks was set up to expose in the first place. Even if the SD does succeed in trouncing wikileaks into oblivion, that very act serves to expose how corrupt governments can be.
- iuyhgthyujik 16y agoHappens everywhere. We were told by one government customer that they weren't happy about the ethnicity/religion of our receptionist. Not telling us to fire them of course - just a 'friendly briefing' of their 'security concerns'
- eli 16y agoDue process for a private company deciding who to do business with?
- citricsquid 16y agoI don't have anything against Paypal or any of the other companies who blocked Wikileaks. I guess in a perfect world it is bad, but if Paypal (and whoever else) weren't to do it and the US government did get angry then who'd be affected? That's right, every other customer (including me). The problem isn't with these companies (although I suspect a lot of this is about how everyone already "hates" Paypal) it's with the governments. It saddens me that these companies are being targeted, people should be shouting at the government(s) putting pressure on the companies, not DDoSing the companies. I'd rather wikileaks had their account closed than the service I receive be affected, however selfish that may be.
- throwaway4rant 16y agoI'm not sure why you are being downvoted here. I suspect it's because people are using the down arrow to disagree with you. Whilst I personally don't agree with your PoV, you raise a perfectly valid point: who is to blame for the heavy-handed treatment of a media outlet (wikileaks). I think it's a great loss that HN has degenerated over the last few years' from a place where you could openly discuss a variety of PoVs in a friendly progressive way, to a place where uncivil rudeness is rewarded and opposing PoV are silenced. I also think it's ironic that in a thread about openness we punish opposing PoVs.
- citricsquid 16y agoIt's fine, I don't mind downvotes, I'd just like to know why I'm wrong :-) If someone wants to downvote and point out why I'm an idiot, great!
- throwaway4rant 16y agoHey, very interesting philosophy. I've often self-censored because I hate being downvoted (probably a problem with my psyche). But...I think I might try adopt your philosophy..
- sausagefeet 16y ago
- meadhikari 16y agoPayPal should have fought this instead of panicking and complying with the State Department. If it's true their exact words to PayPal were that Wikileaks was performing "illegal activities", then they are liars. There is nothing illegal about Wikileaks. In fact, PayPal should have stood their ground.
- allenp 16y agoDoes anyone know if it is possible to get a freedom of information act inquiry to find out if the state department really did advise/request PayPal to do this?
- swaits 16y agoNo need. Pease see the updated text in the post.
- allenp 16y agoGood to know, thanks. I'm not sure if I'm happier knowing the State Department didn't request this or knowing that PayPal is still who I thought they were.
- dfox 16y agoit is interesting to note that the text qouted in the updated article does not say that what wikileaks is doing is illegal, only that initial release of leaked data to wikileaks was illegal.
- Vivtek 16y agoYes, it's possible. They'll take as long as possible to reply, at which time everybody but the historians will long have forgotten the entire incident.
- Zak 16y agoOk, so Paypal was told by a high-level Federal agency that Wikileaks was illegal. Freezing the account seems like the safe response to that. I'm sure, by now, Paypal has figured out that Wikileaks isn't illegal - based on all the calls by lawmakers to ban it, if nothing else. Have they restored the account yet?
- alnayyir 16y ago>Have they restored the account yet? Are you kidding me? That Machiavellian sanity-grinder gave Notch, a legitimate indie developer selling a game about digging through dirt, Hell on Earth just to get his money. PayPal doing the right thing, snorts I'll sprout wings and shave my eyebrows off first. I'd sooner trust the IRS to do right by me than PayPal. Disclosure: My first entrepreneurial effort was annihilated in concert by UPS, PayPal, and eBay.
- citricsquid 16y agooh please don't bring the Notch stuff into this. FYI they were entirely justified with what they did. I administrate the Minecraft forums, there were (and still are) many legitimate complaints from people who paid for the game but never got access because minecraft.net is very poorly built[1]. When his account received millions of dollars in a tiny period of time with numerous complaints do you really think any legitimate company would just give him the money? What they did in his situation was entirely justified and I'd personally suggest it was exactly what they should have done. I'm sure there are many times when Paypal have done wrong, but this really isn't one of them. [1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=91042 http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=91042
- ZoFreX 16y agoAlso: Everyone talks about them "freezing" his account or stealing his money, when they did no such thing. They're simply requiring him to keep a float in his Paypal account to cover chargebacks, and due to the amount of transactions he gets, that float has to be an unusually large amount.
- eli 16y agoSeems like an awful lot of feigned shock about paypal. Paypal has a long history of closing account for arbitrary reasons or for no apparant reason at all. This is especially true of accounts for taking donations (rather than ones selling physical products). If you Google around you can find dozens of people complaining about closed accounts who were taking donations for completely innocuous projects. By comparison, "because the gov't told us it was illegal" seems like a pretty solid reason. The cost of just paying lawyers to figure out if Wikileaks might actually be breaking any laws surely costs more than Paypal is likely to make in transaction fees.
- thwarted 16y agopaying lawyers to figure out if Wikileaks might actually be breaking any laws surely costs more than Paypal is likely to make in transaction fees. Maybe they can use some of the money they collect in interest from having money in frozen accounts. (edited to include more of what I was quoting since it seemed ambiguous as to what I was saying they could do)
- rdtsc 16y agoI am pretty sure they already do this. Any bank that doesn't do that is a joke. The higher the total number of frozen account the larger the amount of immediately available cash. They can use that for whatever they can use cash for, since they are the ones that control the freeze times. At the start of the week the VP probably asks so "how much guarnteed money do we get to play with this week?" and then they get a number and they can do whatever they want, say provide short term loans or invest it some other way.
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- rottendevice 16y agoYou're pointing fingers in the wrong direction. You can hate PayPal all you want, but the government is taking every action imaginable to deny a press outlet it's constitutional right to free speech. Going so far as to intervene with the transactions of a third-party private business to cut off it's funding. 1984 should have been titled 2010.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI'm completely against making WL into a terrorist organization. But that's where we are headed -- or something very close to it. They're not publishers -- at least not in any normal sense I can fathom -- but they are certainly not terrorists either. My point being: if PayPal and others want to play hardball and refuse to shut down their payments because WL aren't criminals, the other side will just up the ante by making them criminals. This is a no-win situation for PayPal and other vendors associated with this CF. Ironically, the vendors who are voluntarily shutting off WL are probably doing the most to help the cause in the long term by not pushing the matter. WL supporters should really hope for a long spell of lowering the volume and everybody behaving like adults for a while. Probably won't happen, though.
- sausagefeet 16y ago> but they are certainly not terrorists either They certainly are instilling terror in US leaders :)
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI know you're trying to be funny, but my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change. So, as funny as you are, they're pretty close, just no banana. If it came out, however, that Assange and pals were considering that any civilian casualties they might cause as a key part of their effort to enact change, I might think very differently. So far, happily, that's not the case. I also think "fear" is a little bit self-congratulatory. Looks to me from watching politicians of every country and party respond, the appropriate phrase is much closer to "pissed off"
- kurtosis 16y ago"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change." Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Economic or computer terrorism that doesn't actually hurt or kill anyone doesn't meet the definition in my view - and the publishing work or WL definitely doesn't either.
- samiq 16y agowhen has paypal been known for defending their users? or even going the extra mile to talk and try to figure it out themselves? ... it's not only a nightmare to work with them as developer, it's also one to have them as a general service providers.
- patio11 16y ago2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction wouldn't buy a lot of loyalty from me, either. If the Internet cheering squad sent them six figures, that would just about cover what it cost to ring legal and schedule, but not actually run, a meeting to decide what to do about this. Legal would, predictably, say that Paypal was not in the business of taking on risk for people whose business model is trolling Joe Lieberman.
- jacquesm 16y ago> 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction wouldn't buy a lot of loyalty from me, either. And here I was thinking you were a man of principles ;) > If the Internet cheering squad sent them six figures, that would just about cover what it cost to ring legal and schedule, but not actually run, a meeting to decide what to do about this. I think the French company OVH went about this the right way, the first thing they did upon finding out that they had wikileaks as a customer they went to a judge to get a ruling. PayPal could have done the same thing easily.
- patio11 16y agoI am a man of principles. Your mistaken assumption is that they are your principles. :)
- ntoshev 16y agoDo you think a payment provider owes their users exactly as much loyalty as big are the fees they have collected from them? Because this is what your comment suggests, and that's a rather unprincipled statement in my book, whatever your principles are. For example, if Paypal acted by this statement, they would allow payment for porn as long as it was profitable for them.
- patio11 16y agof(x,y) evaluating to X for some x=X does not imply f(x,y) = x.
- 16y ago
- ntoshev 16y agoInterestingly, DDoS attacks against Wikileaks can only delay dissemination of information a little bit. DDoS attacks against PayPal, on the other hand, can be effective in costing them real money, for every hour they are down. If I were attacking them, I would target the APIs that merchants use instead of the main site. The main site has probably been DDoSed before, APIs are a subtler target. I imagine a successful attack there would have a broader and deeper impact. Also, have browsers been used for DDoS before? I imagine with the popularity Wikileaks has, you can ask people to keep a page open if they want to participate, and share that page on Twitter/Reddit/Facebook. The page would repeatedly create requests loading the target urls in an iframe or as a script tag. In this approach one would have to get rid of the referrer header, I guess. So open the urls using SSL. The SSL handshake would cause additional load. Not sure how effective would that be compared to a traditional botnet that can delay TCP and SSL handshakes; things browsers can't do.
- cosmicray 16y ago> DDoS attacks against PayPal, on the other hand, can be effective in costing them real money, for every hour they are down. Ever heard the term 'collateral damage' ? If PayPal gets trashed (or at least significantly service impaired) that is going to hurt people way beyond PayPal. People who are trying (as I am) to keep up with the Christmas/Holiday rush, and wondering why so many orders, paid via PayPal, are not completing. An attack on PayPal is an attack on the wider business side of the web. Basically PayPal is the guy caught in the middle of a dispute (between Wikileaks/hacker community and the US Gov/Dept of State).
- jbooth 16y agoBasically PayPal is the guy caught in the middle of a dispute (between Wikileaks/hacker community and the US Gov/Dept of State). Well, then they should've stayed out of it. They haven't gotten so much as an official letter (which BTW would be extremely shady since the executive branch doesn't decide what's legal and not). Even if they did, they're under no obligation to do this unless there's a court order. They got involved because of the politics, they can deal with the blowback.
- 16y ago
- JunkDNA 16y agoReading about these stories the last few days, it occurs to me the Wikileaks strategy is a major factor here. They have not been selective and released actual stuff that rises to the level of true whistle blowing. While the things released (thus far) might be interesting in the way a tabloid article about a celebrity is interesting, they are hardly at the level of the Pentagon Papers. The world has not learned any deep dark secrets about how the US government operates. Given this situation, when the government leans on PayPal and Amazon, there's nothing for them to hold on to and say, "We're going to fight this because we think the public has a right to know X". X needs to be something pretty important to take that position and all the heat it brings.
- mike-cardwell 16y agohttp://www.pcworld.com/article/212910/wikileaks_founder_praised_by_pentagon_papers_exposer.html?tk=rss_news http://www.pcworld.com/article/212910/wikileaks_founder_prai... First paragraph "Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for outing the now famous Pentagon Papers in 1971, and a group of ex-intelligence officers have thrown their weight behind WikiLeaks and its founder, saying the current attempt to label WikiLeaks' leaks as trivial compared to the Pentagon Papers is wrong."
- mike-cardwell 16y agoAlso, it's worth noting that the Pentagon Papers were released by a US citizen for the benefit of Americans. Julian Assange is not a US citizen, is not subject to US law, and did it for the benefit of the World, not the benefit of the US.
- JunkDNA 16y agoHe's entitled to his opinion, but I'm still waiting for someone to point me to information in the wikileaks dump that is a genuine public service. I'm not arguing that the wikileaks dump is trivial. There is information in there that is genuinely harmful from the perspective of the State Department and US government. What I'm arguing is that there's nothing actionable there. I haven't read a single thing that made me say, "wow, what I thought I knew about US foreign policy is all wrong". If that were there, it would be a different ballgame.
- mikecane 16y agoIf the State Department were to declare Wikileaks illegal, would that make everyone holding Wikileaks Insurance an Enemy of the State?
- Vivtek 16y agoI'd say that's a pretty safe bet.
- mikecane 16y agoIf this be treason, make the most of it. -- Patrick Henry (who might not have actually said it, depending on which source you go to, but the sentiment stands nevertheless)
- mike-cardwell 16y agoJulian Assange is no more subject to US law than a US citizen is subject to Iranian law.
- damoncali 16y agoUS citizens are most certainly subject to Iranian law. Just try to commit a crime there and see what happens.
- potatolicious 16y agoNote: I am not a fan of Assange. I think his indiscriminate leaking of everything, however inconsequential, harms the whistleblowing process and makes it all too easy to gloss over the real abuses exposed. But he has not committed a crime in the US. Even if disseminating state secrets is a crime (and the jury's still out on that one, to boot) he didn't do it here.
- damoncali 16y agoWould you bet your freedom on that? I haven't seen the dude strolling about in the States... He's going to pay a big price for his academic experiment. The US government has justifiably killed people over less serious attacks, and citizenship has nothing to do with it. And that's before you get to what has been done without justification (look up Ruby Ridge). When you pick a fight with a giant, you can expect to lose.
- jeremyjarvis 16y agoupdated the title from "State Department Told Us It Was Illegal" to "State Department Said It Was Illegal" following update on TechCrunch post.
- nphase 16y ago“One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you, this case isn’t anything different.” What a non-answer.
- jdp23 16y agoAs an entrepreneur, this is exactly the kind of situation I'm worried about: a service provider (PayPal, Amazon, etc.) shutting me down based on nothing more than somebody in the government disapproving of some of the content on my site.
- mcantelon 16y agoSo: 1) Paypal lied to the public. 2) The State dept. effectively ordered content off the web, not unlike China. 3) Paypal hasn't restored service to Wikileaks, even though it's a legal organization.
- freechoice1 16y agoWell I've cancelled one of my account with Paypal now. More to come.
- zmmmmm 16y agoAm I the only one for whom this seems like a case of mass fail in reading comprehenson? Did anyone actually read the letter? Nowhere in the letter does the State Department say that what Wikileaks is doing is illegal. They use ambiguous and misleading language to imply that but in effect they just keep stating that the original leaker broke the law. If anything, by omission of a direct claim of illegality, this letter is confirmation by the State Department that what Wikileaks did was in fact, TOTALLY LEGAL. Of course, given that PayPal routinely suspends accounts for absolutely no reason at all we can hardly be surprised if they suspend this one. They've always done this and nobody expects more of them.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>this letter is confirmation by the State Department that what Wikileaks did was in fact, TOTALLY LEGAL. I don't know USA law that well, certainly not whatever your equivalent of the UK Official Secrets Act is or your counter-espionage laws. But it stricts me as a no-brainer to assume that publishing documents classified by the government as restricted (or above, secret, top-secret, etc.) would be a criminal offence with a pretty hefty jail sentence attached. Is it really not a crime in the US to publish or hold without clearance documents classified as "secret"?