WIKILEAKS

PayPal, whose parent is eBay, says it stopped allowing people to pay for donations to Wikileaks through them from a letter from the US government.  PayPal suspended payments to Wikileaks last week, and has been followed by Visa Europe and Mastercard.  Amazon and Swiss bank PostFinance have also cut ties with Wikileaks. (see more here)

Hackers immediately attacked those whom they see as WikiLeaks enemies.  Among the attacked were MasterCard, Amazon and PayPal causing several corporate Web sites to become unavailable or slow down markedly.Apparently no individual accounts were compromised in any way. (click here for the NY Times article.)

The whole issue is really a can of worms.  People's right to free speech, giving money where they choose to causes they seriously believe in, and issues of jurisdiction become paramount as the world overlaps itself.  When the government is unable to pass a bill to prevent unemployment checks to those who desperately need them, it sets people to wondering about the things theyh do that are not forced to be voted on, just done in the name of security.

According to some people familiar with the State Department leaks, they seem to be rather serious in the negative affect they have on our relations with other countries, many of whom say they will not speak to Americans in the State Department because they can no longer trust that names will not be written down and who knows where they will turn up. Nevertheless, as always in situations like this with whistleblowers, it serves to make everyone aware just how fragile our secrecy and operations are in terms of keeping our laundry, dirty or otherwise, to ourselves.