Freedom of the Press Foundation was established yesterday by several American personalities, including actor John Cusack with the goal to support “aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption and law-breaking in government”. according to the website WikiLeaks.
The information was confirmed by a statement posted Sunday on the website founded by journalist Julian Assange.
Wikileaks website became known worldwide in 2010, after it published a series of confidential reports on the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, in approximately 250,000 U.S. diplomatic telegrams.
In its press release, called “Wikileaks declares war on banking blockade,” site administrators accuse giants Visa and Mastercard credit cards, and online payment site Paypal and Bank of America of having “blocked donations made to the benefit of WikiLeaks.” This led to a drop of site’s funds “from over $1 million in 2010 to less than a thousand dollars in December 2012”.
In late November, Julian Assange said that the blocking of donations has led to an overall loss of 30 million pounds.
“We struggled with this immoral blockade for two long years. We won in courts (…), in France and Germany today, and with our generous and powerful friends who still believe in the First Amendment we will overcome in the United States,”
said Julian Assange.
Foundation allows “donations for WikiLeaks, which will now be tax deductible in the United States and in Europe.” Foundation also allows funding of other information sites such as The up Take, TheNationalSecurityArchive and MuckRockNews.
Monday at 12.00 GMT, these four sites each received a first donation of $23.
Julian Assange, aged 41, has been living since June in the Embassy of Ecuador in London where he applied for and was granted political asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden where he is accused of alleged sexual assault. Assange, journalist and civil rights activist, rejects accusations in Sweden, saying the Stockholm authorities want to extradite him to the United States where he is accused of publishing thousands of secret diplomatic and military cables on the website WikiLeaks.
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