Financial Problems May Possibly Shut-Down

WikiLeaks said it will shut-down by year end if financial services companies don't lift restrictions on donations that have hobbled the organization.

The website which publishes leaked, sensitive documents said it is temporarily suspending all publishing operations so that it can devote its resources to battling Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal, Bank of America Corp. & other companies that have prohibited payments to the site since last December.

The last major WikiLeaks release, hundreds of thousands of U.S. government documents about Guantanamo Bay detainees, was in April.

"This financial blockade is an existential threat to WikiLeaks," Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, said in London on Monday. "If the blockade is not torn down by the end of the year, the organization cannot continue its work." He said the payment companies had bowed to political pressure from Washington & have prevented WikiLeaks financial contributors from supporting the cause of their choice.

Days after WikiLeaks began releasing a slew of confidential U.S. State Department cables last November, companies including PayPal, MasterCard & Visa prohibited users from making donations to the site. Those limits have stayed in place ever since, putting a damper on WikiLeaks' fund raising efforts.

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