Companies stop Wikileaks payments

Wikileaks is a voluntary organisation which relies on donations to pay for its operations. Over the past few days, two of the main sources of that money have been blocked. On Tuesday, the credit card giants Visa Europe and Mastercard said they would suspend payments to Wikileaks, following a similar move by the online service Paypal on Friday. But the company which receives credit card donations on Wikileaks' behalf is threatening legal action. Datacell, an IT firm based in Iceland, has refused to comply with requests to shut down its donor account. It says those requests were based on "untrue and unverified accusations". It claims that if its credit card facilities are withdrawn permanently, its own business will be in danger - and it will sue the credit card firms for damages, which it says would not be small.

維基解密網站是一個志願性的組織，其日常運作的維持全都仰賴於各界的捐款。在過去幾天內，它們兩大資金來源全被封鎖住了。星期四，VisaEurope及MasterCard集團宣布它們將要暫停對維基解密的付款，而接下來Paypal網站在星期五時也追隨它們的腳步，接受這些幫助維基解密網站的捐款匯款的公司正威脅到了它們自身的合法性。Datacell, 一家位於冰島的資訊公司，拒絕遵守關閉捐款帳號的要求，它們說：這些要求是基於一些不正確，也並未驗證過的指控。並宣稱如果它們的信用卡帳戶將被停止的話，公司的營運將會面臨危險的處境，它們也會對信用卡公司提出告訴，求償其受損的金額，它們說這不是一筆小數目。