

You can donate to WikiLeaks until July 1 - goldfeld
http://wikileaks.org/FOR-THE-NEXT-49-DAYS-YOU-CAN.html

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sami36
What kind of society we live in where corporations, whatever their political
leaning or agenda is, decide how we can spend our money.. or not.

A few years ago, I've gone completely "plastic" & banished cash from my
wallet. In light of developments such as this, I'm starting to reconsider my
decision. Today Visa, tomorrow Square..

~~~
anologwintermut
God forbid square starts blocking payments ... how will we ever get asian
fusion tacos from our favorit food trucks?

Square uses Visa, Mastercard, etc. If Visa blocked something, you'd have a
hard time buying it with square and if Mastercard + the rest did, Square
wouldn't save you.

Visa doesn't get to decide how you spend your money, they get to decide how
you use their system. Since no government provides electronic payments, there
is no other convenient way to donate to wikileaks (mailing them cash seems
risky).

Why do governments not provide electronic currency? I'm not sure, but if they
did I suspect we'd be using faxes to send DES encrypted coins places.

Yes, there are problems with the system and there ought to be regulations on
it, but in general it makes sense how we got here.

~~~
kolinko
Fortunately there is always Bitcoin:

[http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate#dbitcoin](http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate#dbitcoin)

~~~
mh-
Good luck getting money onto Bitcoin (for Americans) without using¹ a payment
network controlled by Visa (Visanet) or the Fed (Fedline, Fedwire).

and no, sketchy in-person meetups to trade for cash don't count.

¹ _directly or via an intermediary_

~~~
trevelyan
Bitstamp is pretty good. The only problem is that the cost of an international
wire is a significant part of the purchase price unless you are converting at
least 1000 USD.

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salimmadjd
Though I have reservations for Assange, I can't think of a better way to fight
against Big Brother's secret machine than to donate and ask my friends doing
the same.

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goldfeld
I kinda wish Jimmy Wales would run one of his intrusive fundraising banners on
behalf of WikiLeaks on this last week of open donations. That'd be hard for
the US to crack down on Wikipedia in retaliation without digging itself into
an even bigger PR hole. Kinda like the setup Snowden arranged by placing
himself in Hong Kong.

~~~
jmduke
Wales isn't a huge fan of WikiLeaks:

 _“If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send
it to Wiikileaks.”_

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/18/jimmy-wales-
wikileaks/](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/18/jimmy-wales-wikileaks/)

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joshfraser
Please donate, but keep in mind by using Visa you're opting in to a special
NSA watch list.

~~~
kintamanimatt
That seems a little speculative.

~~~
alexqgb
Not anymore.

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thatinstant
What about using BitCoin as a form of receiving donations?

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goldfeld
However I'd think they can still do far more with direct dollars/euro they
receive, especially since they should have hands tied for options of
converting Bitcoin to dollars. As more of the services and goods that
represent their operational costs accept BitCoin, though, that problem should
go away. I wonder what hope we'd have in this context without something like
BitCoin becoming strong.

~~~
kolinko
It's quite easy for them to convert bitcoin into fiat, wherever they are.

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lazyjones
The Wau Holland Stiftung in Germany still accepts donations in Bitcoin and
using a bank transfer for Wikileaks:
[http://wauland.de/de/spenden.html#04](http://wauland.de/de/spenden.html#04)

If you use a credit card, a small percentage (processing fee) goes to the
corporations that decided to sabotage the Wikileaks efforts, so perhaps you
shouldn't do that ...

~~~
goldfeld
People are lazy, as you must know, and if WikiLeaks wants to maximize their
donations the link above is more straightforward than through a German bank or
BitCoins, which takes some learning and setup for those who don't have it
(yet) like me.

Further, I sympathize with your idealism, but you should then refrain from
using your credit card at all, should you not? In all the other cases, you are
not only giving money to the corporations, but also most definitely not giving
money to a non-profit! Also don't ever buy anything from big corporations
again (I actually wish I could afford to do that.)

Otherwise, surely the processing fee going to the "enemy" (to quote the US of
A) is a small price to pay when the chief of it is going to an organization
that has the balls to stand up for our rights, as to make your request
ludicrous.

Having said that, I upvoted you, thanks for outlining alternatives, which will
be especially helpful after the posted donation channel is closed by Visa.

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Raphael
Could I mail a paper check? Or would that be considered terrorist financing?

~~~
Tobu
[https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate#dcheque](https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate#dcheque)

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mfkp
Watch out, the donate link in the article (and the one in the header of their
website) doesn't use SSL. You can manually type in https and it works.

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goldfeld
To the moderation: that's a really innacurate change of the title. People only
have 8 more days to donate, the sense of urgency is a tad bit higher in that
context. Given stories rarely stay on the frontpage across days, changing it
to "8 days" would be more accurate, I think.

