Icelandic IT firm, Datacell, to sue VISA Europe and MasterCard for ceasing payment processing for Wikileaks.
Icelandic IT company Datacell today said it will take legal action against Visa Europe and Mastercard in light of both companies decisions to cease processing payments associated with the WikiLeaks website.
Datacell said they will use legal mechanisms to try to force the card companies to resume accepting WikiLeaks payments immediately.
Datacell’s CEO Andreas Fink said that Visa should ‘just simply do their business where they are good at – transferring money’.
It is unclear what the ‘legal mechanisms’ are but the card processing giants may have breached their contractual obligations to Wikileaks.
Meanwhile, @Anon_Operation, a group claim responsibility for an unprecedented level of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on the same companies that have started freezing funds and assets of Wikileaks, has also fallen victim to corporate interference. The group announced that Facebook removed its Operation Payback page for apparently “hateful, threatening or obscene” content.
Wikileaks is also reported to be considering legal action against PayPal for breach of contract according to a radio interview with Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and staunch advocate for Wikileaks can be heard here.
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So the cyber battle will work its way through the courts now, pitting corporations against each other and tech savvy anarchists are likely to keep assaulting corporations and government sites for trodding on the free flow of information.
UPDATE: Greenwald is also on To The Point
UPDATE II: Twitter has now suspended @Anon_Operations with 22,173 followers. The group claimed to be considering targeting Twitter already, claiming Wikileaks taken off ‘trending’ topics. This may confirm the next two targets are Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is Wikileaks primary mode of communication, along with Facebook. Targeting these two companies may not serve the original purpose of ‘Operation Payback’
