Group Aims to Be a Conduit for WikiLeaks Donations

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/group-aims-to-be-a-conduit-for-wikileaks-donations/

December 16, 2012, 4:02 pmComment
By DAVID CARR

¶A group advocating a more transparent government has formed a nonprofit organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation to serve as a conduit for donations to organizations like WikiLeaks. The goal is to insulate those groups’ fund-raising efforts from political and business pressures.

¶In December 2010, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would no longer accept transactions for WikiLeaks, the online leak group that released thousands of secret documents from the American government. The move to cut off donations, which came after vocal protests against the organization’s activities from members of Congress, eliminated the vast majority of financing for WikiLeaks.

¶Board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation include Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower who disclosed the Pentagon Papers; Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who writes about civil liberties for The Guardian; John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Xeni Jardin of the Web site Boing Boing; and John Cusack, an actor who has been a vocal opponent of government secrecy.

¶The foundation has created a Web site, which was scheduled to go online Sunday night, that will allow visitors to donate anonymously to various journalistic and investigative projects. By accepting donations for more than one organization, the site hopes to prevent any single one of them from being targeted.

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“WikiLeaks is not perfect, but whatever mistakes it might have made, it serves a legitimate and necessary function in exposing an administration that is completely lacking in transparency,” Mr. Ellsberg said.

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