[LINK] Datacell supports wikileaks

[Max Devlin]

At least someone is prepared to stand up to corporate blackmail

http://www.datacell.com/news.php

  	
News in respect to Wikileaks
8th December 2010 12:30 CET

Since yesterday around 22:30 CET Visa and Mastercard payments are
being rejected on our donation system. We have received a suspension
notice stating that Visa Europe has ordered our payment processor to
suspend payments and undertake due diligence investigation in order to
pretect the Visa brand ensure neither the payment processor nor Visa
Europe is running legal risks by facilitating payments for the funding
of the Wikileaks website. For the same reasons the payment processor
has suspended the payments of Mastercard.

The suspension period will be one week with effect from 8 December
2010 Danish local time. The suspension period may be prolonged.

DataCell ehf who facilitates those payments towards Wikileaks has
decided to take up immediate legal actions to make donations possible
again. We can not believe Wikileaks would even create scratch at the
brand name of Visa. The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a
violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have
explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks
and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their
brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have
them occur. Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that
they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them.
It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down.
We strongly believe a world class company such as Visa should not get
involved by politics and just simply do their business where they are
good at. Transferring money. They have no problem transferring money
for other businesses such as gambling sites, pornography services and
the like so why a donation to a Website which is holding up for human
rights should be morally any worse than that is outside of my
understanding.

Visa is hurting Wikileaks and DataCell ehf in high figures. Putting
all payments on hold for 7 days or more is one thing but rejecting all
further attempts to donate is making the donations impossible. This
does clearly create massive financial losses to Wikileaks which seems
to be the only purpose of this suspension. This is not about the brand
of Visa, this is about politics and Visa should not be involved in
this.

If you want to donate, use wiretransfers. And make sure your local
Visa partner knows that it is your sincere wish to donate to Wikileaks
using your Visa card. We will do our best in the meantime to support
Wikileaks.

Andreas Fink
CEO
DataCell ehf
7th December 2010

Since 2 months we operate a payment gateway so people can donate to
Wikelaks. From the press we hear Mastercard and Visa are closing
donations towards Wikileaks

We have been contacted by Visa with the wish to close down the account
for donations to Wikileaks. We had no contact from Mastercard until
now. After discussions with our lawyers, we have decided that we can
not honor such requests based on the pure simple fact of untrue and
unverified accusations.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship
and/or limitation. The right to freedom of speech is recognized as a
human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights and recognized in international human rights law. Furthermore
freedom of speech is recognized in European, inter-American and
African regional human rights law.

It is simply ridiculous to even think Wikileaks has done anything
criminal. If Wikileaks is criminal, then CNN, and BBC, The New York
Times, The Guardian, Al Jaseira and many others would have to be
considered criminals too as they publish the same informations. Nobody
even tries to touch them though. You can still buy a New York times
subscription and pay with your credit card I guess.

We have not even heard of the Wikileaks organisation being accused
anywhere in the world for any crime. The conclusion is that it is only
honorable to donate to Wikileaks as they fight for our human rights.

DataCell is only doing work for Wikileaks in helping them processing
credit card payments. We can look at it from every perspective as we
want, we are helping a honorable organization to get its funding it
needs to sustain the load on their servers and deliver the messages
the public wants to read.

If large companies such as Visa or Mastercard, who hold the duopoly of
the credit card transactions world wide, think they have to put
priority on political influence over the law, they have to be ready to
take damage claims in the billions of Euro's and they have to be ready
to loose a big chunk of their business. This might be very well the
end of the credit card business worldwide.

Andreas Fink
CEO
DataCell ehf
Interview in Icelandic TV
Interview with Tele Basel in swiss German 	
	
  	
DataCell ehf, Skulagata 19, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland 	[mobile ver]