The U.S. Government Blocked Diners Club from Accepting Wikileaks Payments

After Visa

and Mastercard

suddenly stopped processing donations to Wikileaks in December 2010, the group attempted to accept payments from cards from Diners Club and its parent company Discover

, only to be told that the U.S. government "intervened with Discover," rendering the company unable to process donations. The phrase comes from an email sent to Datacell, the hosting and datacenter firm that accepted donations on Wikileaks's behalf before Visa and Mastercard suddenly stopped processing payments to the media group in December 2010. Since then, Datacell has scrambled to look for alternatives to allow individuals from around the world to donate to Wikileaks. A few days after Visa and Mastercard suspended payments, a lead investor in Diners Club named Patrick Liotard-Voigt contacted Datacell to recommend that they process Diners Club cards instead. Datacell CEO Andreas Fink jumped at the chance."I told him, of course we are interested," Fink told me in an interview. Liotard-Voigt immediately asked Diners Club CEO Anthony Helbling if they could accept payments for Wikileaks. Helbling got back to the investor the same day with a simple answer: no. Liotard-Voigt explained in an email that Helbling "has informed me that the U.S. government has intervened with Discover. We can not process donations. Perhaps you can find a different solution." Datacell has continued to face roadblocks since then. This year in July, they signed a contract with Valitor, an Icelandic payment processing company that would allow the firm to receive credit card payments again, including payments from American Express, which had never accepted payments for Datacell before. After accepting donations to Wikileaks for twelve hours, Valitor suddenly rescinded their contract with Datacell. In an email to the company, they said this was "due to a violation of general terms." After Datacell filed a complaint with the EU, alleging that Visa and Mastercard have ordered payment processing companies "to refuse to supply payment card acceptance services to Datacell solely because Datacell has provided payment card processing services to Wikileaks." The complaint is still outstanding. Today, Datacell received a letter from American Express regarding its problems with Valitor. In it, the credit company insists that it "did not influence the decision" of the processing company to terminate its contract with Datacell. The response comes almost two months after Datacell contacted American Express about the contract termination. Visa and Mastercard still do not acknowledge whether they received pressure from any government agency. It remains impossible to make direct donations to Wikileaks with a credit card, although the group has found indirect ways around this, according to its website.