WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks announced Monday that it was suspending “publishing operations” to concentrate on raising money to keep the website in business.
The announcement was made nearly two months after WikiLeaks made public its entire unredacted file of purloined U.S. State Department cables.
“This is an existential threat to WikiLeaks,” WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange told a news conference in London. The news conference was streamed live on the Internet.
In announcing the suspension, WikiLeaks blamed U.S.-based financial institutions, including Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union, for refusing since December to process donations destined for the website. The refusal had robbed WikiLeaks of 95 percent of its income, the website said. It said the institutions had acted at the behest of the United States’ government.
“The blockade has cost the organizations tens of millions ... in lost donations at a time of unprecedented operational costs resulting from publishing alliances in over 50 countries,” WikiLeaks said in a news release. “Our scarce resources now must focus on fighting the unlawful banking blockade.”
Assange noted that while the credit-card companies had cut off donations to WikiLeaks, they had not cut off donations to the fund that raises money to pay lawyers for his defense against Sweden’s efforts to extradite him for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. He said the difference showed that the financial companies were concerned with WikiLeaks’ publication of documents.
He said the group needed to raise $3.5 million in the next year to continue its operations at current levels. He said the website currently has 20 staff members and about 800 volunteers.
There was no immediate response from the financial institutions or the U.S. government. Previously, the organizations have denied they canceled WikiLeaks accounts at the instigation of the Obama administration; they said WikiLeaks had violated their service agreements by engaging or encouraging illegal activities — the leaking of classified government documents.
WikiLeaks, which has not been charged with a crime for publishing the documents, warned that if the financial institutions are allowed to continue with what it calls a “blockade,” other contentious advocacy groups could face similar retribution. Assange has argued that the credit-card companies had become virtual public utilities, given their importance in Internet commerce, and he said their refusal to allow their cardholders to support WikiLeaks amounted to a restriction on the right of free association — something he said had a long and honored history in the United States.
He also contended that newspapers that had published stories based on the WikiLeaks documents could face similar retaliation.
“If publishing the truth about war is enough to warrant such aggressive action by Washington insiders, all newspapers that have published WikiLeaks’ materials are on the verge of having their readers and advertisers blocked from paying for their subscriptions,” the website said in its news release.
The immediate practical effect of WikiLeaks’ announcement Monday was unclear. The last of the State Department cables were made public Sept. 2 and WikiLeaks’ spokesman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, told McClatchy Newspapers last week that the website had not been able to accept new submissions for much of the past year. Statements from WikiLeaks over the summer indicated that much of its unpublished material had been destroyed by disgruntled volunteers.
Hrafnsson blamed “sabotage” from those disgruntled former volunteers, whom he did not name, for the website’s inability to accept submissions, but said the lack of resources had made it impossible to restore WikiLeaks’ submission software. On Monday, however, Assange said the website would unveil a new submission system Nov. 28 — the anniversary of the beginning of the publication of the State Department cables.
WikiLeaks’ site remained available on the Internet on Monday.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 10/25/2011