On top of attacks from cyberactivists looking to bring his website down, Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks project have had to deal with a number of big businesses pulling their support in recent days - not least where sources of revenue are concerned.
Most recently, Visa announced it will suspend all payments made to WikiLeaks. It denied that the decision was made after pressure from the US government, but said it was pending an investigation of the organisation's business.
Mastercard had already stopped funneling payments to the site due to rules which bar use 'for directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal', CNET cites a spokesman as saying.
PostFinance, the banking arm of the Swiss Post Office, says it closed an account Assange had set up, for giving false information - an address.
WikiLeaks had advertised the PostFinance account details online to "donate directly to the Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks Staff Defense Fund," giving an account name of "Assange Julian Paul, Geneve."
PayPal announced last week it would stop taking donations for WikiLeaks. "PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal acceptable use policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," it said in a statement. WikiLeaks blamed 'US government pressure' on its Twitter feed.
WikiLeaks soon switched to French provider OVH, before a French minister called for the site to be banned from French servers - a court declined to act on his demands.
WikiLeaks also adopted a Swiss address set up by supporters in that country, but this was taken offline hours later by US host provider EveryDNS.net.
WikiLeaks 'threatened the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure which enabled access to almost 500,000 other websites', the BBC reported the company as saying.
Reports on TechCrunch Europe say the company could be receiving vital assistance from payments start-up flattr - which has a Pirate Bay co-founder on board (itself a target of the authorities.)
WikiLeaks reportedly now has 14 DNS servers, according to the BBC, doing the job that EveryDNS refused to do. Many are in Europe, out of reach, for the meantime, of US authorities.
Over the weekend, the Swiss Pirate Party listed 21 websites where WikiLeaks could be found, in the wake of the site losing its .org.
While WikiLeaks' finances and servers are under siege, the cables will keep coming via its high-profile media partners, The Guardian, New York Times and Spiegel.
Twitter is also still on board. With WikiLeaks updating its shifting whereabouts, the company is still able to report its latest moves to 444,000+ followers.
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