Although some hackers are malicious or merely venal, many have always been driven much more by a desire for freedom of speech and information. The current cyberware surrounding WikiLeaks’s publishing appears to be just another aspect of an ever growing freedom of speech movement since there doesn’t appear to be any financial gain for any of the hackers – this is not an attempt to obtain credit card numbers or personal information.
As I reported earlier on Newsblaze.com(), hacker groups supporting WikiLeaks’ disclosure of embarrassing emails and memos between government agencies have launched a denial of service (DoS) attack against those companies which have refused to accept new donations to the web site.
Most of this war and presumably all the coordination between hacker groups is being conducted online, which is certainly appropriate for what is the biggest free speech event in the history of the Internet.
Now it appears that PayPal may also be under attack and Amazon.com might be next, since that site has reportedly stopped storing WikiLeaks’ documents.
But while this cyberattack on financial firms continues there is one small U.S. company, xipwire.com, which appears to be the only one still accepting money to support WikiLeaks.
Having never used the service, this reporter can’t personally vouch for its security but it appears to be completely legitimate, a recent Philadelphia-based startup offering a mobile payment system.
You can find Xipwire’s mission statement on their Facebook page.
Tuesday evening they posted this statement on Facebook:
“In response to PayPal cutting off the embattled international nonprofit media organization, Philadelphia startup Xipwire announced today it is collecting donations for WikiLeaks via text.”
The company’s Twitter link is:
http://twitter.com/XIPWIRE