Here is a follow up letter from Jerry on the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Looking up the Freedom of the Press Foundation is heartening. You’d have to explain the following history to your readers so that they would understand why socially astute leaders created the Foundation. The reason is that non-legal, non-government, no-recourse-in-the-courts steps were taken to suppress political dissent. The Foundation restores political donations to a menu of crusading organizations. Here is the timeline that made it obvious to many that a funding foundation was needed to protect the public funding of political dissent.–jerry
THE ATTEMPTED SUPPRESSION OF WIKILEAKS: TIMELINE
Tuesday 30 November 2010
Amazon steps in after DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, to solve Wikileaks Web presence issues, by giving them “Simple Storage System” (S3) data hosting and “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2) computational support (Web page servers) ca Tue 30Nov. (S3 and EC2 are collectively called AWS, Amazon Web Services.)
Joe Lieberman’s staffers phone Amazon Wed, 1Dec2010.
Joe Lieberman publicaly thanks Amazon Wed, 1Dec2010.
Senator Joe Lieberman’s office promptly calls to place pressure on Amazon to oust Wikileaks. After Amazon does so on Wed 1 Dec., Lieberman publicly stated it was the right thing to do and he hoped it would set a standard for all American companies.
¢ Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, calls for Wikileaks to be taken offline. “I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”
Wednesday 1 December 2010
¢ Overnight Tues 30Nov-Wed1Dec2010, Amazon removes Wikileaks’s content from its S3 and EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to Wikileaks “ and that it was not due to political pressure or the (right wing) hacker attacks against the Amazon site.
1 Dec marked Amazon’s complete removal of Wikileaks data from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS hosting service had provided Wikleaks’ Web server mirrors.
¢ TECH: Tableau Software, which offers free software for data visualization, removes the public views of graphics built using information about the diplomatic cables. It admits that the reason was pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman.
The company EveryDNS gives wikileaks.org 24 hours notice to set up another site and DNS service “pointing” to it by 03:00GMT Thursday 2 December.
At 3AM GMT Thurs 2 Dec, 10PM EST Wed 1Dec, everyDNS ceases DNS name resolution for Wikileaks. EveryDNS acted just after Amazon took down the Wikileaks server mirrors
Thurs, 2 December 2010
Stripped of both its page servers and the DNS translation service pointing to them, wikileaks.org moves to Europe as “wikileaks.ch”
Friday 3 December 2010
Fri 3Dec/Sat4Dec 2010: I (JIN) canvass my suburban WashDC subdivision (ca 100 homes) for financial support for Wikileaks. Just go to the Wikileaks page and send some money. But government employees tell me they have been told it is illegal to go to the site even on their home computers. “It’s OK if you don’t contribute, forget I even asked” I tell the lady who explains she works for the CIA.
Wikileaks shifts to a backup domain registered in Switzerland as Wikileaks.ch, and actually hosted in Sweden, at Wikileaks.ch, though the cables are hosted in part by OVH, an internet provider in the north of France.
¢ FRANCE: French industry minister Eric Besson writes to internet companies warning them there will be “consequences” for any companies or organisations helping to keep WikiLeaks online in the country.
PROTEST on the RIGHT, PROTEST on the LEFT
EveryDNS claims that the DDOS attacks against Wikileaks were disrupting its service provided to thousands of other customers. The company says it is “following established policies so as not to put any one EveryDNS.net user’s interests ahead of any others. Lastly, regardless of what people say about the actions of EveryDNS.net, we know this much is true – we believe in our New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die.”
Saturday 4 December 2010
¢ MONEY: PayPal, owned by US auction site eBay, permanently restricts the account used by WikiLeaks due to a “violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy”. A spokesman said the account was suspended because “[it] cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”
You can still donate at Commerzbank Kassel in Germany or Landsbanki in Iceland or by post to a post office box at the University of Melbourne or at http://wikileaks.ch/support.html
¢ TECH: Switch, the Swiss registrar for Wikileaks.ch, declines pressure from US and French authorities to remove the site or block access to it.
7Dec 2010 Visa Europe halts service to WikiLeaks
¢ MONEY: Visa Europe begins to suspend service to the Wikileaks account a day after Master Card. “Visa Europe has taken action to suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks’ website pending further investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules,” said a spokesman.
The BBC reports, MasterCard Worldwide is choking payments to the Wikileaks site.
The BBC reports, Swiss bank PostFinance has closed Julian Assange’s account there.
The companies have insisted that their decisions are not politically motivated.
Wednesday 8 December 2010
¢ MONEY — PAYPAL
“Speaking at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Osama Bedier, vice-president of platform, mobile and new ventures for PayPal says that ‘What happened is that on November 27th [the day before Wikileaks began releasing cables] the State Department, the US government basically, wrote a letter saying that the Wikileaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States. And so our policy group had to take a decision to suspend the account… It was straightforward from our point of view.’ He added, ‘We … comply with regulations around the world, making sure that we protect our brand.’ ”
“Though he later reined back the comments, saying that PayPal had not been contacted directly by the State Department but had seen a letter it had sent to WikiLeaks, his remarks will undoubtedly intensify criticism from supporters of WikiLeaks that the site is being targeted for political reasons.”
“Note: an earlier version of this [Guardian] article wrongly referred to easyDNS.com as having provided DNS routing for Wikileaks. This was wrong, and the company was not involved at that time – although easyDNS.com is now providing routing for Wikileaks.ch.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/operation-payback-mastercard-website-wikileaks
(PayPal cut off Wikileaks payments on Saturday 4 Dec 2010.)
PAYMENT EMBARGO SUMMARY:
Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America blocked support of political site Wikileaks.
–end