By RANDELL A. MONACO, Esq.
December 4, 2010
How much influence has Corporate America had on the recent efforts and mobilization of the international community and the U.S. Justice Department to censor WikiLeaks who has become an important international transparency organization?
Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders on Saturday condemned the personal attacks on Assange and "the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure" in what it called the first "attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency."
The question being begged is to what extent have the recent intervention efforts been stepped up out of concern of exposed wrong doing and the promised WikiLeaks release of information come Monday about conduct on Wall Street and in the U.S. Banks? It seems more than coincidence that the intervention of US Senator Joseph Lieberman resulted in the decisions of Dynamic Network Services Inc., PayPal and Amazon Inc..
On December 2, 2010 American owned EveryDNS dropped WikiLeaks from its entries, citing DDoS attacks that "threatened the stability of its infrastructure". The validity of that concern should be questioned. The site's 'info' DNS lookup remained operational at alternative addresses for direct access respectively to the Wikileaks and Cablegate websites.
In step with Dynamic Network Services Inc., Amazon Inc. severed its ties with WikiLeaks, to which it was providing infrastructure services. As reported by Dylan Welch of theAge.com.au this followed the intervention of an aide on behalf of US Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Then, on December 4, 2010 PayPal, the payment processor owned by eBay, permanently cut access to WikiLeaks.org. In a blog posting PayPal claimed that WikiLeaks violated its "Acceptable Use Policy".
There seem plenty of reasons to question PayPal’s claims and Amazon’s denial of acting under political pressure following the intervention of Senator Lieberman’s aide. Senator Lieberman, who later praised Amazon's decision and called for other companies to follow suit, has also proposed new legislation to amend the Espionage Act to include the “publication” of “human intelligence” targeting similar cases — Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination Act, also known as the SHIELD Act .
Without discussion or public statement of review of obvious constitutional concerns related to the freedoms of speech and press, corporate America and the international community have acted to censor what should have been recognized as a public service to our Nation. The vulnerability and release of this information has exposed the real concern, NOT the publication which was after the fact.
Also, access to WikiLeaks has been blocked in the United States Library of Congress. Importantly, on December 3, 2010, the White House Office of Management and Budget dispatched a memo forbidding all unauthorized federal government employees and contractors from accessing classified documents publicly available on WikiLeaks and other websites. Presumably this would include off hours access from personal non-public computers.
Is seems that what is being focused on is the embarrassing wrong doing possibly by, and between, both Wall Street and government officials. This is speculation but this sequence of events is beginning to look and walk like a duck!
The temporary shutdown of WikiLeaks seems an end to an extraordinary week for Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, and possibly a warm up of things to come in the week ahead for Wall Street and others yet to be named.
A call to action for the boycott of Amazon, PayPal and eBay this Christmas Season would be a worthy stand for Global Democracy.
