Online payment service PayPal has suspended the WikiLeaks' account that the organization used to collect donations, it said in a statement.
U.S.-based PayPal said WikiLeaks, which this week released thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, had violated its policy.
"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," the statement said.
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"We've notified the account holder of this action," it added.
A posting on WikiLeaks' Twitter page said "PayPal bans WikiLeaks after US government pressure."
PayPal is one of several ways that WikiLeaks takes in donations to finance its operations.
On Friday, WikiLeaks directed readers to a web address in Switzerland after two U.S. Internet providers dropped it in the space of two days.
The Internet publisher directed users to www.wikileaks.ch after the wikileaks.org site on which it had published classified U.S. government information vanished from view for about six hours.
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Can site survive?
Questions have been raised about whether WikiLeaks will be able to survive.It is facing attacks in cyberspace and in the legal sphere. The site is assailed by hackers and has been booted from its U.S. server. Frontman Julian Assange is in hiding and faces allegations of sexual misconduct.
Although the future is uncertain for the website, it has opened a Pandora's Box of secret-spilling that some believe could prove difficult to reverse.
"Whatever happens to the domain name and the actual organization, the idea unleashed by WikiLeaks is going to continue," said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab.
Ben Laurie, a data security expert who advised WikiLeaks before it launched in 2006, agreed.
"The concept is not going to die. It's really hard to keep things shut down if they want to stay up," he said. "Look at everything else people would like not to happen online — phishing, spam, porn. It's all still there."
Little is known about the day-to-day functioning of WikiLeaks. It has no headquarters, few if any paid staff — but a famous public face in Assange, a wiry 39-year-old Australian computer hacker with no permanent address.
He's on the cover of newspapers and magazines around the world, but he has not appeared in public for a month.
Assange, who is somewhere in Britain, is the subject of a European arrest warrant issued by authorities in Sweden, where he is accused of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.
If British police arrest him, he will likely be caught up in a lengthy legal fight against extradition and could be jailed.
Assange denies the Swedish charges, which his British lawyer, Mark Stephens, has said stemmed from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex."
He said Assange was happy to speak to Swedish prosecutors and had provided his contact details to authorities there and in Britain.
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Powerful enemies
Assange also has made powerful enemies in the United States, especially since WikiLeaks released thousands of secret logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this year.With the latest leaks, U.S. politicians have called for him to be prosecuted for espionage — or worse.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked on Facebook: "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?"
There has been talk of attempting to prosecute Assange in the U.S. under the Espionage Act or other legislation that might cover a foreign citizen.
"We are taking the appropriate precautions to the degree that we are able when dealing with a superpower," he told The Guardian newspaper in the U.K.
Monday 6 December 2010
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