Visa: WikiLeaks Guilty until Proven (Twice) Innocent

/in /by

The AP reports that a Swedish company Visa Europe hired to study whether WikiLeaks was breaking the law or Visa’s own rules has “found no proof the group’s fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland.” But, the AP goes on, Visa will not accept WikiLeaks donations until it completes its own investigation, which has thus far lasted eight weeks.

Shorter Visa: “we’re going to keep investigating this until we find some justification to explain why we’ll accept donations to the Ku Klux Klan but not WikiLeaks.”

Now, this says one of two things about Visa.

Either, Visa is saying it arbitrarily will decide to stop doing business with any customer it chooses until such time as it proves that customer is innocent. Imagine the absurdity of standing at a check-out counter while Visa not only does a criminal background check, but scrambles with its lawyers to invent new legal theories by which you might be breaking the law.

Or, Visa has stopped processing Wikieaks donations at the behest of the U.S. government based on lies. And even after the government admitted that it had told lies to shut down WikiLeaks, Visa continues to stall for time to come up with an adequate explanation for why it’s doing so.

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  2. skdadl says:

    Dear VISA: I want you to know that I am taking this very personally.

    How do we get that message through? It has to be a mass action (that will be very hard on a lot of people), or they just won’t care.

  3. BoxTurtle says:

    Don’t be too hard on VISA. It’s likely they’re being blackmailed by ObamaLLP. They make money on every transfer, and I don’t think they’d leave that money lying on the table.

    BoxTurtle (either that or it’s bribery, perhaps a hidden bailout of a subsidary somewhere)

    • skdadl says:

      To me, they are facilitating a return of McCarthyism. The only way to stop it is to recognize that a citizen (or a private corpse) cannot submit to politicians saying what the law is. If there’s a contest, then the courts sort that out, reading by the constitution. But no one, individual or corporate, should give in before that happens. (Mind you, I am a bit worried about the current state of the courts.)

  4. mzchief says:

    The banksters (Visa is just a part of that) have a lot of opinions about how you should spend your money and with whom. Mostly they wonder what their money is doing in your pocket in the first place.

  5. MsAnnaNOLA says:

    It is possible they are doing this in exchange for some sort of pressure or influence being put on some nation around the world as has been revealed by Wilileaks. So many of those cables show the US govt pressuring and trying to change other govts laws to suit US corporate interests. I think this is an inappropriate use of scarce state resources and influence. If I am remembering correctly at least one of those cables is US State Dept doing bidding of credit card companies.

  6. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Visa is in the business of international payments processing. It is utterly dependent on US government acceptance of its practices. Most assuredly, it will have given the government full access to its systems and databases, as MasterCard will have done (six degrees of separation from one’s CC and all that). The excuse it is attempting to sell, that it is reacting to WikiLeaks according to a “normal course of business” standard, persuades no one. No licensed bookmaker or unlicensed bookie would give odds on it.

    • bluesky says:

      Below a link to an article by Christopher Soghoian (Graduate Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecuity Research, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University):

      “A 10 page Powerpoint presentation (pdf) that I recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request to the Department of Justice, reveals that law enforcement agencies routinely seek and obtain real-time surveillance of credit card transaction. The government’s guidelines reveal that this surveillance often occurs with a simple subpoena, thus sidestepping any Fourth Amendment protections.”

      Full post including a link to the PDF here:

      http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2010/12/dojs-hotwatch-real-time-surveillance-of.html

  7. shekissesfrogs says:

    The KKK doesn’t threaten the security state, which is the entity that protects corporate profits. They are parters.
    I’ve been following the events in the Middle East closely, and here’s a witness account of how the State Security Police work w/ industry to keep the workers oppressed and exploited http://bit.ly/fbJKfq
    Same thing, our country just lies about it, and Egypt does it in plain sight.