Wikileaks Under Attack

PayPal, the popular online payment service has "permanently restricted" the account used in fund-raising efforts by WikiLeaks.

"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," the service said in a statement on its blog Friday.

 

Wikileaks, meanwhile, updated its Support page, crossing out the PayPal option.

Wikileaks has been under attack this week since it released to the media and posted on its site about 250,000 confidential cables sent by U.S. diplomats, some of which turned to be rather scandalous and damaging to U.S. Foreign Policy,.

U.S.-based EveryDNS.net shut down the wikileaks.org domain on Thursday, saying it is experiencing major hack-attacks, which threaten its service for thousands of other customers.

WikiLeaks responded by tweeting its IP address: http://88.80.13.160. It also found new homes at Swiss, German, and Finnish domains: http://wikileaks.ch/, http://wikileaks.de, and wikileaks.fi, respectively.

Supporters of WikiLeaks see the site as a defender of transparency in government and of freedom of information. Critics, including the U.S. State Department say that through the release of its latest information, as well as releases earlier in the year of documents regarding U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the site is putting lives in jeopardy and undermining the national security of the United States.