WikiLeaks says MasterCard lifts 'financial blockade'

MasterCard’s financial blockade against WikiLeaks has been lifted more than two years after the credit card company first took measures to keep their customers from supporting the anti-secrecy website.
WikiLeaks announced in a press release Wednesday that MasterCard
International has reversed its decision to not process payments
for WikiLeaks, and that customers can once again contribute to
the site’s operations.
MasterCard, along with VISA, PayPal, Bank of America and Western
Union, stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010
after the website began publishing a trove of classified
diplomatic cables pilfered from the computer networks of the US
Department of State.
WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange has previously called
the embargo “an unlawful, US influenced, financial
blockade” and “an existential threat” to his
organization. With MasterCard once again willing to work with
Assange and his website, however, the future of WikiLeaks may be
revived — and at a time when arguably at its most relevance in a
while.
Whereas the publication of State Department cables brought an
array of critique directed at WikiLeaks at the time, the website
has become of renewed interest as of late following an alliance
of sorts established between Assange and Edward Snowden, the
30-year-old former government contractor who has been leaking
classified National Security Agency documents to The Guardian,
the Washington Post and other media outlets. Assange has said
he’s involved in brokering a deal that could aid in asylum being
granted to Snowden, who is currently wanted by the United States
on charges of espionage, while Assange himself is also awaiting
safe passage to Ecuador where’s he’s been offered assistance
against his own prosecution.

According to an article published on Tuesday by The Washington
Post, Assange has spoken to Snowden’s father and said he could
coordinate an intermediary to exchange messages between the two.
“We are obviously concerned,” Bruce Fein, an attorney for father
Lonnie Snowden told the Post. “If Julian Assange can talk to
Edward directly, why can’t his dad?”
Republished with permission from: RT