A WikiLeaks appeal to protect media freedom has been published in the prestigious German daily newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, as a large advertisement.
It was funded by the Campact online activism group.
The ad (http://bit.ly/zeitungsanzeige) demands that Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon immediately resume business relations with WikiLeaks.
“Putting themselves above the law, the quasi-monopolists are trying to make the revelations platform run aground financially,” Campact writes in an email to its supporters.
At the end of last week several German newspapers made a passionate appeal against this assault on media freedom.
“We now demand that the German representatives of Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon engage in public discussion of press freedom.”
(http://www.campact.de)
Comments
Re: Big ad, newspaper backing for WikiLeaks in Germany
It should ring a bell that this support does not come from indymedia Germany but from NGOs which work with commercial marketing, although there is not much daylight between the country´s hacker scene and Wikileaks. For more than a decade now the local indymedia comment box has been polluted by secret police, making any attempt of an reasonable exchange of information there an uphill battle. The rise of a second indymedia Germany in the aftermath of the Heiligendamm summit protests could somehow contain that situation, but it would not result in a change of tide. I do not know of any other instance around the world that an American ambassador was summoned over Cablegate only to be told that it was all going to go under the carpet, other than the German governor who is the worst proponent of eavesdropping in the entire federation (search term: Volker Bouffier + Philip Murphy). In the indymedia world, some local branches are in a much more precarious situation than others. Still, in all these places there are organisations which successfully fight back against secret police and have the potential to enhance their local indymedia branches if the rest of the world is beginning to see the problem. indymedia as whole can obtain a strengthened position against the totalitarianism of democracy if it identifies the weak nodes in the network and helps the activists there help themselves.