PayPal account restricted site WikiLeaks as world comes under scrutiny

PayPal Inc., the payment processor owned by eBay Inc., cut the current access to the website of whistleblowing WikiLeaks.org for violating the acceptable use policy.

PayPal account suspended after the U.S. WikiLeaks said that activities were in violation of the law, a company spokesman. PayPal was not contacted by any government agency and took action on its own, the spokesman said.

PayPal movement marks a new suspension of Wikileaks, which is the release of about 250,000 classified diplomatic cables to the U.S., France and the United Kingdom say that could endanger life. Amazon.com Inc. fell in the WikiLeaks website hosting service this week for breaching the terms of service.

"PayPal has permanently restricted account used by Wikileaks, due to a violation of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our paid services can not be used for any activity that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to participate in illegal activities, "PayPal said in his blog. "We notified the account holder of this action."

Wikileaks had a previous encounter with PayPal in January, when it was temporarily blocked. The payment processor cut off access to the organization after it failed to respond to a request for further information when fundraising efforts led to an influx of money. Cash flow triggered the automatic alerts of money laundering, although the situation was resolved about a day later, the spokesman said.

Terms of Service

Amazon, the online retailer based in Seattle and web hosting service, Wikileaks said it had violated its terms of service by publication of material that did not have and that was potentially "put innocent people at risk."

site Wikileaks' U.S. was closed after the electronic attacks threaten the stability of access to other web sites, according to EveryDNS.net, the U.S. service that translates the online directions to the Internet protocol numbers.

Since beginning the liberation of the cables on November 28, WikiLeaks has also faced calls denial of service attacks, where hackers try to overwhelm a website with the repeated requests for data.