Pictures

Photo

Reuters Photojournalism

Our day's top images, in-depth photo essays and offbeat slices of life. See the best of Reuters photography.  See more | Photo caption 

Photo

Weird homes

Home is where the heart is, no matter what unusual form that home may take.  Slideshow 

Photo

The drone wars

The frontlines of America's covert drone program.  Slideshow 

Sponsored Links

PayPal suspends WikiLeaks donations account

Related Topics

1 of 2. A screen shot of a web browser shows the wikileaks.ch home page with a portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange next to the out of service wikileaks.com domain, in Lavigny December 4, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Valentin Flauraud

WASHINGTON | Sat Dec 4, 2010 1:32pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Online payment service PayPal said it has suspended the WikiLeaks' account that the organization used to collect donations.

U.S.-based PayPal said in a statement that WikiLeaks, which this week released thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, had violated its policy. A posting on WikiLeaks' Twitter page said "PayPal bans WikiLeaks after US government pressure."

A statement on the PayPal site said: "PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action."

PayPal is one of several ways that WikiLeaks takes in donations to finance its operations.

On Friday, WikiLeaks directed readers to a web address in Switzerland after two U.S. Internet providers dropped it in the space of two days.

The Internet publisher directed users to www.wikileaks.ch after the wikileaks.org site on which it had published classified U.S. government information vanished from view for about six hours.

(Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Bill Trott)
Tech
WikiLeaks
We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of Reuters. For more information on our comment policy, see http://blogs.reuters.com/fulldisclosure/2010/09/27/toward-a-more-thoughtful-conversation-on-stories/
Comments (25)
Nigmand wrote:
Are we surpised? Rhetoric question. More will follow this side, but the opposite one, too.

Dec 04, 2010 8:57am EST  --  Report as abuse
Stellastu wrote:
America could use some strong lessons on the meaning of the word freedom.

Dec 04, 2010 10:04am EST  --  Report as abuse
Alive wrote:
Paypal cannot be trusted or relied on to do the right thing, i am closing my account with this hopeless organisation.

Dec 04, 2010 10:21am EST  --  Report as abuse
This discussion is now closed. We welcome comments on our articles for a limited period after their publication.
See All Comments »