PayPal caves in to Wikileaks pressure

Paypal has been the latest Silicon Valley darling to cave in to demands not to supply Wikileaks - Bloomberg:

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- PayPal Inc., the payment processor owned by EBay Inc., cut access today to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.org for violating its acceptable use policy.

PayPal suspended the account after the U.S. said WikiLeaks activities were in violation of the law, a spokesman for the company said. PayPal wasn’t contacted by any government agency and took the action on its own, the spokesman said. PayPal’s move marks a further crippling of WikiLeaks, which is releasing about 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that the U.S., France and the U.K. say could endanger lives. Amazon.com Inc. dropped WikiLeaks from its website-hosting service this week for breaching terms of service.

Watching the way the Silicon Valley technology Elite has caved in to pressure from the US Authorities over Wikileaks has been a fairly clear lesson in some basic facts:

(i) The US talks Free and Brave but scratch the surface and its the same old same old as any other state. From now on they will find it very difficult to have any moral authority in relation to other states. Is this what they intended? Is this what the people who voted for Mr Obama stand for?

(ii) Silicon Valley talks Free and Brave but caves before there is even a hint of trouble (Wikileaks has done nothing officially illegal, there are no lawsuits, no official government activities, it probably can claim 1st Amendment, and yet Amazon nor Paypal have not lifted a finger). Kudos to Twitter and ICANN for keeping it going so far.

(iii) The US Free Press talks Free and Brave but has scarce lifted a finger in defence of Wikileaks, Free Speech, et al, but is all the while continuing to make money out of it and enjoy the skewed morality of watching Senator Liebermann try and skewer Wikileaks for reporting exactly the same information they are. It's up to a few brave US blogs to hold the Free Speech torch.

(iv) The US Libertarian Intelligentsia, those people who immediately turned their Avatars Green for Iran, Red for this, Black for that, and shed virtual tears for cause after cause, are nowhere to be found on this one. I assume manning this barricade is a bit too close to home, when one's own life is just a little bit at risk here? Stand up and be counted, or sit down and sip latte's - no contest, Dude! Moral cowardice rocks.

What this proves is that the US, governmentally, corporately or severally, cannot be trusted with having the huge control over the Internet that it does, as it is not a responsible enough owner. The real lesson is that other countries need to start to work to create independent internets that can't be messed with on the whim - and it is a whim, there is as yet no legal challenge to Wikileaks - of an independent Senator from Connecticut (and no doubt a few powerful fixers behind him). Update - I see David Winer has come to a similar conclusion.

Far be it for me to invoke Godwin's Law, but this is exactly the sort of behaviour one sees at the outset of any emerging despotism. Time and again, the lesson is that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that basically good people do nothing.