Visa Says It's Still Not Processing Transactions for WikiLeaks
Contrary to widely-circulated reports in the Associated Press and Forbes, Visa did not lift its financial blockade on WikiLeaks, a Visa spokesperson tells The Atlantic Wire. Earlier today, headlines splashed across the web …
Context & Ripple Effects
Six months into the financial siege that began when Bank of America cut off WikiLeaks in December 2010, the blockade story briefly appeared to break: Associated Press and Forbes reports on July 7 said Visa had resumed processing, and The Firewall ran the reopening claim under its own headline. Visa's spokesperson has now knocked the story down — the company still does not process transactions for the organization, making this a correction cycle rather than a policy change.
The timing matters because WikiLeaks had given Visa and MasterCard a deadline: per its confirmed July 1 threat, a legal complaint against both networks was to be filed if the blockade lasted another six days. A false report that the pressure had worked — followed by an immediate denial — lands right inside that window, and against the backdrop that WikiLeaks faces no Justice Department charges over the State Department disclosures.
First-order effects
- WikiLeaks' donation pipeline stays closed: cardholders who believed the AP/Forbes reports that payments were flowing again will find transactions still refused, and the organization's threatened complaint against Visa and MasterCard proceeds on its original footing.
- Associated Press and Forbes take a credibility hit on a fast-moving story they got wrong at the wire level, while Visa is forced into public spokesperson-level damage control to restate a policy it set in December 2010.
Second-order effects
- MasterCard, PayPal and the other processors that joined the December cutoff now face the same question Visa just answered — whether any of them will actually move first, or whether each will let the others absorb the reputational pressure from WikiLeaks' legal threat.
- Newsrooms and aggregators get a case study in single-sourcing a payments reversal: the reopening claim propagated across multiple outlets before Visa's denial, raising the bar for confirmation before running blockade stories.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, private payment networks are functioning as de facto gatekeepers over which publishers can receive money — deciding access without any legal finding against WikiLeaks, and setting a template other financial intermediaries can apply to controversial organizations.
- A sustained blockade with no criminal charges behind it builds the case for treating financial-network access as a due-process question, putting regulators and lawmakers under pressure to define when processors may refuse lawful customers.
The trend: Payment networks are becoming the decisive chokepoint for online speech and fundraising, with corporate denials and corrections — not courts — setting the terms of who gets paid.