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You are here: Home / The Slow Dawning of a Clue

The Slow Dawning of a Clue

by @heymistermix.com|  December 26, 20109:11 am| 19 Comments

This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment

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It merely took the refusal of the entire US banking system to process their payments, but the New York Times finally understands that the vilification of Wikileaks might be a bad thing:

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

But the clue is only partial:

A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

If you are really unpopular, like Wikileaks, you’ll be the target of distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS), and then you will get kicked off your ISP’s network. That’s just as a big an issue as banks refusing to process payments.

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Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    cathyx

    December 26, 2010 at 9:30 am

    It amazes me that it’s just now dawning on them, those who could be harmed by this, that this could happen; that banks and telecoms could overreach.

  2. 2.

    cathyx

    December 26, 2010 at 9:43 am

    I think you have a typo in the second block quote. Shouldn’t the sentence read may refuse, not may not refuse?

  3. 3.

    balconesfault

    December 26, 2010 at 9:50 am

    What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations?

    I guess that’s even simpler and quicker than just buying all the mainstream media outlets.

  4. 4.

    mistermix

    December 26, 2010 at 9:57 am

    @cathyx: No, that’s how it reads — the NYT really thinks that ISPs can’t refuse to host you on their network. Which, of course, isn’t true.

  5. 5.

    cathyx

    December 26, 2010 at 9:58 am

    @mistermix: Then in that case, they really are clueless as to the possible overreach.

  6. 6.

    hilzoy

    December 26, 2010 at 9:59 am

    It will be interesting to see whether this is legal. If memory serves, it is not legal under British common law for e.g. an inn to deny shelter to someone because they just don’t like him — he has to have done something specific, like been rowdy and disorderly, to get thrown out. I don’t know how far this sort of obligation extends, to what extent it has been superseded by statute, and if so, whether the statutes in question increase or decrease bank and credit card companies’ right to do this. It will be interesting to see.

  7. 7.

    gizmo

    December 26, 2010 at 10:00 am

    Here is Glenn Greenwald’s list featuring some of Wikileaks greatest hits, and we’re just barely into the 250,000 diplomatic cables….

    http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/24/wikileaks/index.html

  8. 8.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    December 26, 2010 at 10:18 am

    Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

    First they came for someone else, and I sort of dimly saw that maybe this wasn’t good at least in principle, then, when they came for me, I wished that there were someone smarter than me left to protest more forcefully.

  9. 9.

    Linda Featheringill

    December 26, 2010 at 10:29 am

    It is interesting that many journalists in the US don’t see WikiLeaks as investigative journalism. I’m not sure about journalists in other countries.

    It is also interesting that they seem to think that if they are good kids, nothing bad will happen to them.

    But most of these people are not kids, either good or bad, and are old enough to be adults. One of the marks of an adult is the realization that bad things can happen to you. And that is why we need guiding principles, to protect us all when we are vulnerable. In this case, the guiding principle is freedom of the press.

  10. 10.

    jrg

    December 26, 2010 at 10:51 am

    I guess the NYT finally realized that they might actually need to defend freedom of the press when Palin is elected emperor queen of the universe, and decides to up her neocon cred by declaring war on Massachusetts.

    …Or perhaps they realized they might discover something about Wall Street (entirely by accident), so they’d better be on the lookout for reprisals against legal activities by our free market, totally not taxpayer subsidized galtian overlords.

  11. 11.

    jayackroyd

    December 26, 2010 at 11:04 am

    The NYT ALMOST manages to say that the current money center banks should not really be regarded as institutions in the private sector, but rather as public sector agencies.

    They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees.

  12. 12.

    dr. bloor

    December 26, 2010 at 11:52 am

    @jrg:

    I doubt it involved anything so thoughtful. More likely some drunken bankster at a Christmas party reminded Pinch Sulzberger that he has him by the short hairs now.

  13. 13.

    PS

    December 26, 2010 at 12:13 pm

    @Bill E Pilgrim: Applause

  14. 14.

    Holden Pattern

    December 26, 2010 at 12:18 pm

    The NYT has clearly never read any ISP’s acceptable use policy or terms of service. They’re non-negotiable for all but the biggest customers, and they basically allow the ISP to shut down their customer for almost any reason at all (including in many cases, merely affecting the ISP’s reputation).

  15. 15.

    Judas Escargot

    December 26, 2010 at 1:12 pm

    Hey, it’s free market capitalism.

    Anyone who doesn’t like what the banks are doing is of course free to start their very own bank and do whatever they like with it.

    Right?

  16. 16.

    burnspbesq

    December 26, 2010 at 3:18 pm

    @Holden Pattern:

    I’m not sure I see your point. If you think that ISPs should be subject to a must-carry rule, your beef is not with the New York Times, it’s with the FCC.

  17. 17.

    burnspbesq

    December 26, 2010 at 3:20 pm

    @Judas Escargot:

    Yes, in the sense that if there is money to be made by doing a thing, and it’s not obviously illegal, somebody somewhere will be willing to do that thing for the right price.

  18. 18.

    Holden Pattern

    December 26, 2010 at 4:52 pm

    @burnspbesq: I’ll walk through it slowly:

    1) NYT opines that it’s a bad thing for banks to be able to just refuse to process payments because they can just shut down companies because they don’t like them. (Including, probably, the NYT — heaven forfend!)

    2) NYT also opines that a telco can’t do what the banks are doing.

    3) I state that the NYT is simply wrong, and that most ISPs (including domain registrars, DNS hosts, web hosts, colo providers, bandwidth providers, and even people like Google, Yahoo!, etc.) can in fact legally do exactly what the banks are doing. As we saw when Wikileaks had to keep rolling over domain names and Amazon shut them down.

    And your response is to tell me that my beef is with the FCC because ISPs don’t have a must-carry rule? Maybe that’s true, but it’s completely orthogonal to the point I was making, which is that the NYT (or at least the editorial board) is ignorant of the actual facts about the way Teh Internets work.

  19. 19.

    sturgeonmouth

    December 26, 2010 at 9:18 pm

    As I said on my blog last week, the for-profit NYT needs to show real support for non-profit Wikileaks by setting up a fund for donations. Pool the resources so that more money makes it to Wikileaks’ Icelandic bank account and less into the hands of Western Union.

    http://sturgeonmouth.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-support-wikileaks.html

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