Bank of America Cuts Off Wikileaks Transactions 467
Chaonici writes "The first actual bank to do so, Bank of America has decided that it will follow in the footsteps of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, and halt all its transactions that it believes are intended for WikiLeaks, including donations in support of the organization. 'This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.' Coincidentally, in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine, Julian Assange stated that he was in possession of the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, and that he planned to release information about a major bank early next year."
Re:Assange also claimed a poison pill if arrested (Score:5, Interesting)
his arrest was temporary and for show. nothing more.
not worth getting big guns out just for that. that was simply a practice run.
this drama won't end for years, in all probability.
and keeping it all alive is *exactly* what the big liars don't want.
btw, if I was a bofa customer, I'd pull all my funds out of their bank. if my bank pulls this shit, I'll definitely yank my account and transfer it all elsewhere. it will be a hassle but I'm fully willing to do it. (hint, its over 6 figures, too. that HURTS banks, if enough of us do that).
Looking forward to another wikileaks story (Score:5, Interesting)
Though this isn't the best fit, I came across a quote by Thoreau in a short story called "Repent Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman that seems like a good fit for the whole thing in general so I thought I'd share.
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc.
In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves
on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men
can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads;
and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without _intending_ it, as God.
A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and _men_--serve the state with their consciences
also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and
they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Re:Assange also claimed a poison pill if arrested (Score:5, Interesting)
I think, technically, he turned himself in to the UK police.
Which I think is a strategic move on his part. Once Sweden extradites him, in all likelihood, he can't be extradited *from* Sweden by another country (say, US). Note that he got bail in the UK despite basically being a nomad, and all he has to do is spend four hours during daylight hours and four hours during night hours at a friend's mansion. I suspect (and it is just a guess) that the reason is that he agreed not to fight extradition to Sweden. Note also that the criminal charges he faces in Sweden do not carry any mandatory jail time.
Re:Here is the thing about banking... (Score:2, Interesting)
You could just call it extortion - someone from any other country would.
Re:Here is the thing about banking... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even wonder that the show might be on the other foot, that the Bank of America knowingly dealt with criminals of all sorts including terrorists and that is what they really fear.
Re:To paraphrase *our* douche (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:5, Interesting)
They are known as MBNA in Europe (Bank of America took over MBNA, but kept the MBNA name in Europe because it is much better known than BoA), and they are in trouble with the Office of Fair Trading for their debt collection practices http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/dec/14/mbna-credit-card-debt-procedures [guardian.co.uk]
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:5, Interesting)
This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.'
Too bad Wikileaks is not an international drug running [bloomberg.com] or firearms smuggling [pbs.org] organization, they appear to be more befitting "internal policies".
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:3, Interesting)
If you believe that helping the homeowners with mortgages would have magically helped stop the recession then you are woefully ignorance of economics.
Why? Because you say so? Oh, and how about all that TARP money? Yeah, that totally saved the economy!
Nice circular justification (Score:5, Interesting)
"We will no longer process payments to them because they are not consistent with our policy for who we process payments to."
This tautology neatly covers the fact that Wikileaks has been charged with precisely zero crimes over Cablegate. These upstanding organizations all like to pretend that they are following the law, but they are actually taking the law into their own hands. I hope they get the shit sued out of them.
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, this is total crap. Just more evidence that the banking system is more corrupt than anyone ever imagined. I mean Visa and MasterCard were content to deal with the Canadian Pharmacy operation for a DECADE and now suddenly the financial institutions are ganging up on WikiLeaks of all things?
Remember guys. If you want to do something about this, your best bet is to support BitCoin [bitcoin.org], a peer to peer currency with a small but rapidly growing economy. A BitCoin is worth roughly 25 cents on the exchanges. The production BitCoin network needs your CPU or GPU time to grow stronger, so mosey on over and grab the distribution. It's MIT/X11 licensed.
I have been enough to America (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure it is only a bunch of anecdotial story, and so no real evidence, but really I call bullshit on what you said. The US is not a country of polite people. Provide us evidence of it and maybe we'll all think our anecdotial evidence is only a sign we got bad luck. until then, all i have to answer you is : get real.
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:5, Interesting)
That will just make it illegal to send money to Bitcoin.
While I've taken a personal stance that sending money to Wikileaks via Bitcoin is a good thing, most of the people on the Bitcoin forums are against the idea and the lead developer wants to stay away from Wikileaks as long as he can. It is already causing grief for the Wikimedia Foundation, especially as Jimmy Wales ended up buying the domains for Wikileaks through a comedy of errors (via Wikia).
The nail in the coffin on the idea of using Bitcoin to send money to Wikileaks is that the Wikileaks guys don't want it either. If you set up an address for Wikileaks, they won't even take the bitcoins. I think they are foolish to do that, but that is their prerogative and not something you can force upon a group like this. Their main complaint is that they can't get the money out to pay their bills... something that is of a concern. You can easily exchange Bitcoins for Liberty Reserve Dollars, but getting your money out from LR Dollars isn't easy either and that seems to be the main sticking point.
Bitcoins certainly isn't ready to process tens of thousands of dollars in daily throughput to and from federal reserve notes... at least yet. There are some volunteers and interested parties trying to get that going, but it isn't there yet, and you certainly can't buy bitcoins with PayPal or a credit card at the moment unless you personally know somebody with a stack of bitcoins willing to sell them in a direct exchange.
About the only thing bitcoins are good for at the moment is to trade Dollars for Russian Rubles and the other way around. It works pretty good that way and I got at least a couple of Rubles via Bitcoin. You can also indirectly trade both currencies for Japanese Yen, although that market is still quite slow as there aren't many in Japan trading bitcoins at the moment. Somebody selling pounds might be a potential market that currently isn't being met either.
Side note (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be ditching my Mastercard soon. However, there are no real alternatives. Here in Europe there's the German EC debit card but it is only accepted in Germany, Switzerland and neighbouring regions.
This situation is actually more concerning than Oracle becoming arseholes over Java. Most likely, the US government can influence payments globally.
Re:Scheming American bastards (Score:5, Interesting)
It sure doesn't help. Neither does the overall level of apathy and lack of awareness of current events beyond the heavily filtered TV news sources.
The real killer, IMHO, is that we're so physically isolated by the oceans that relatively few Americans visit other developed countries to see how other people live. When I first spent a few months in western Europe, I felt like those Soviet soldiers in WW2 that Stalin subsequently purged because they had seen how well people lived in the West, contrary to Soviet propaganda.
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need Wikileaks or /. comments to see obvious evidence of fraud, corruption and criminal activity by BofA and all of the other big banks.
Municipal bond bid-rigging
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-24/bankers-rigging-municipal-contract-bids-admit-to-lying-to-cover-up-tracks.html [bloomberg.com]
Failing to transfer mortgage notes into MBS trusts . . . but not keeping them on the balance sheets either? Hmmmmm.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/11/countrywide-routinely-failed-to-send-key-docs-to-mbs-trustees.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+(Economist's+View+(EconomistsView)) [typepad.com]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/bofa-drags-balance-sheet-confidence-backward-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html [bloomberg.com]
These are great because a senior BofA executive testified under oath that BofA routinely never trasnferred mortgage notes to the mortgage trusts when they were sold as "Mortgage Backed Securities" i.e. they were really "Nothing Backed Securities"
Now, the funny part is that BofA is Disavowing the testimony of its own executive.
http://www.bankinvestmentconsultant.com/news/bofa-mortgage-2670073-1.html?zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1 [bankinvest...ultant.com]
If you need any further evidence of fradu and corruption, "4closurefraud.com" also has a mountain of dirt and evidence of fraud, forgery and corruption bu BofA and the other the big banks.
Anyone still doing business with these scumbags is either completely apathetic to the idea of "voting with your dollars" as a form of social activism, or just a fool.
Re:Our advise is to place your funds somewhere saf (Score:4, Interesting)
You'll notice that the US Government didn't really do *too* much to Assange after his prior leaks. Hell, he already leaked before and they didn't "shut 'em down". On the other hand, they shut the hell out of dozens of domains that pirates trademarked purses and stuff last month. If they can do that, why can't they do the same for something that supposedly "puts national security and lives at risk"? Right, because it doesn't and it didn't.
However, THIS time, he warns that he has pretty dire information about financial institutions and THEN shit suddenly hits the fan. The clear point here being that it's the FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS that are putting the screws to him.
Re:I've been loving these articles (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither were Bonnie and Clyde... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if the bank succeed in assassinating Julian Assange, WikiLeaks will release the documents to their mainstream press partners.
(Think about it. if he, as the public face of WikiLeaks, causes only a 1% drop in stock valuation, that's still billions of dollars out of the pocket of the banking community. The man's dead. He'll be a martyr, but a very dead one.
[The "rape trial" is obviously an attempt at character assassination. Rape as a crime is NEVER pursued so much as to cause extradition. Once the leak is done with, the charge will be done with...
{Julian Assange may be a prick and an egotistical asshole. For all I know he may even be guilty. Rape charges DON'T happen like that unless somebody with "mui dinero" is calling the shots.
(Think of what YOU could expect if your sister was the victim. Do you see the cops from the local precinct running to another country to capture somebody. Its not even a murder. That's what I'm saying.)}])
Now the question is how scared are these partners.
Do the Guardian, the New York Times and half a dozen other still retain enough editorial integrity not to knuckle under from the shit storm of advertising the banks are going to unleash defending their fictional record and fighting the truth of how nefarious, perfidious, greedy, grasping, manipulative, wanton crazed, depraved and devoid of human sensibility, their actions are.
Banks are definitely not charities.
They aren't even businesses.
They're banks.
They handle money, and money is the root of all evil.