Pulling the Plug on Wikileaks - Priceless

             

"MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products," a spokesman for MasterCard Worldwide said today.
That further limits the revenue sources for WikiLeaks, which has seen its finances systematically attacked in the last few days, as the Swiss authorities shut down a bank account used by editor Julian Assange, and PayPal permanently restricted the account used by the group.

Pressured by the US government, their leader chased by the Interpol and kicked off their servers by Amazon, Wikileaks is on the run. But fear not: The organization has found a new refuge, and a French judge declined yesterday to force web provider OVH to shut down the WikiLeaks site, after the government called for the whistleblower website to be kicked out of France.  OVH is the biggest internet hosting provider in France, and the second largest in Europe.

The legal challenge came after French Industry Minister Eric Besson called for WikiLeaks to be banned from French servers after the site took refuge there on Thursday, having been expelled from the United States.

The new servers will share the load with their Servers in a Swedish nuclear bunker, which has been the home of WikiLeaks since last August.  There are reports that the Swedish servers have recently been under attack by hackers.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to U.K. police this morning as part of a Swedish sex-crimes investigation, the latest blow to an organization that faces legal, financial and technological challenges after releasing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

Swedish prosecutors issued the arrest warrant for the 39-year-old Australian, who is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another.

Assange surrendered at 9:30 a.m. local time and was due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day, London's Metropolitan Police said.

If he challenges his extradition to Sweden, he will likely be remanded into custody or released on bail until another judge rules on whether to extradite him, an official told The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Phillip J. Crowley, a U. S. State Department spokesman, recently condemned Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks as an “opportunist [who] threatens to put others at risk to save his own hide.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told Reuters on Monday that he is personally involved in the criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. He repeatedly refused to elaborate whether that would include search warrants.

“I personally authorized a number of things last week and that’s an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level of involvement at the Department of Justice,” he said.

He also declined to say whether the Obama administration could try to shut down the WikiLeaks site….

“I don’t want to get into what our capabilities are,” Holder said. “We are looking at all the things we can do to try to stem the flow of this information.”

It is not all bad for Assange - Australia has said that he is free to return to his homeland, and street vendors in Naples are selling Assange figurines to go in nativity scenes.

Unfortunately, the plaster Julians, and, to a certain  extent,  the Wikileaks founder himself,  look something like a cross between Alfred E. Newman and Mortimer Snerd.