Under pressure from the US government, a growing number of US Corporations are refusing to have anything to do with WikiLeaks on the dubious rationale that it is a criminal organization.

As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, this is nonsense unless you also think that the New York Times, which has also been publishing the leaked cables, is a criminal organization.

The most worrisome part about this, for me, is seeing PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard doing this. When I went to make a donation to WikiLeaks yesterday, I found out PayPal wasn’t processing donations for WikiLeaks anymore. I ended up doing it through a company called Datacell using my Visa debit card, but then just found out today that Visa wasn’t processing donations to WikiLeaks anymore. I had been just in time.

The risk here is that we could end up in a world where, if the government really doesn’t like you, they can simply ask all the big financial organizations to cut you off from any possible source of funds, including funds for a legal defense against trumped up charges. That’s a world where it may not matter if you technically have rights against arbitrary imprisonment.

On the plus side, it seems unlikely that this kind of government action will be able to shut down things like Bit Torrent. I’m currently seeding torrents (which you can find links to with a Google search) of the main collections of WikiLeaks documents, and as long as people do that, the documents will remain available. In fact, maybe in the future we’ll see WikiLeaks replaced by TorrentLeak.

Addendum 12/8: I would boycott Visa, except without my debit card, I would have no way to buy food. That’s a big part of what scares me about this. We’ve given big corporations too much power over our lives.