ARTICLE

The Cutting Edge of Censorship

DECEMBER 08, 2010 by N. JOSEPH POTTS

Someone – someone very important – doesn’t like what Wikileaks is doing. So, Senator Joe Lieberman (?-Conn.) asked Amazon.com whether it had kicked Wikileaks off their server right after Wikileaks’s publication of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables. It turns out, they “had” – right after he asked.

Worse by far, they’ve gotten PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard to stop handling donations to Wikileaks. Now, these payment-handling facilities are all “private” property. But they’ve all cut off Wikileaks, and all at the same time (all citing “terms of service” violations that Wikileaks’s previous activities don’t seem to have triggered).

A similar financial censorship was noted in October of last year, when New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind ganged up with twelve other New York City politicians and jawboned all the payment-handling companies to do the same thing to Holocaust Historian David Irving.

Whom else does Someone disapprove of? Well, just watch the No-Pay List. You’ll see them there first. The Washington Post? New York Times?