The Guardian reports: Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, has announced that the whistleblowing website is suspending publishing operations in order to focus on fighting a financial blockade and raise new funds.
Assange, speaking at a press conference in London on Monday, said a banking blockade had destroyed 95% of WikiLeaks’ revenues.
He added that the blockade posed an existential threat to WikiLeaks and if it was not lifted by the new year the organisation would be “simply not able to continue”.
The website, behind the publication of hundreds of thousands of controversial US embassy cables in late 2010 in partnership with newspapers including the Guardian and New York Times, revealed that it was running on cash reserves after “an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade” by the Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union.
WikiLeaks said in a statement: “The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.
“The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicised US finance companies continues regardless.”
Assange said donations to WikiLeaks were running at €100,000 a month in 2010, but had dropped to a monthly figure of €6,000 to €7,000 this year.
One can hope that some analogous organization takes Wikileaks’ place. The actions of the media-financial alliance to quash WL is scabrous, but the release of unredacted material, putting so many people doing dangerous work in potential harms way is unforgivable. The concept deserves a better leader than Assange.