Banks and WikiLeaks
The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.
Context & Ripple Effects
The financial blockade is the sharpest escalation yet in a two-year arc: after a 2008 domain-name deletion forced WikiLeaks to seek legal help, the site now faces something harder to litigate — banks refusing it service. Bank of America severed ties on December 18, and per the NYT the Justice Department has pressed no charges over the State Department cables, leaving private institutions acting where prosecutors have not.
The timing matters because WikiLeaks is reportedly preparing a release targeting Bank of America itself, though that remains unconfirmed, and the cutoff lands amid a confirmed spate of DDoS attacks around the cable dump. Whether WikiLeaks counts as a publisher or something else — a debate GigaOM framed earlier this month — is exactly what the banking industry is deciding unilaterally.
First-order effects
- WikiLeaks loses mainstream payment channels without any court order, forcing it onto alternative funding routes just as its operating costs rise.
- Bank of America and other card networks set a de facto publishing standard: service can be withdrawn pre-charge, based on each institution's own risk judgment.
Second-order effects
- Supporters' DDoS attacks against financial targets turn the blockade into a two-front fight, raising the cost of the cutoff for the banks themselves.
- A rumored WikiLeaks trove on Bank of America gives every bank a concrete incentive to treat disassociation as defensive positioning rather than principle.
Third-order effects
- If payment networks become an extra-judicial enforcement layer, publishers' survival will hinge on financial infrastructure access rather than legal guilt — a structure regulators and policy makers, already pushing for tighter internet controls after the disclosures, will have to address.
- The pattern repeats the 2008 domain-deletion episode at higher stakes: chokepoint operators, not courts, increasingly decide which outlets stay online.
The trend: Financial infrastructure is emerging as the decisive gatekeeper for controversial publishers, with banks and card networks enforcing consequences ahead of any legal process.