Daily Mail
September 19, 2011
Fancy rifling through secret diplomatic cables on a WikiLeaks computer? Or how about a lovely signed and fingerprinted glossy photograph of Julian Assange relaxing during house arrest in Norfolk?
The whistle-blowing organisation, denied its usual revenue stream by a pesky financial services embargo, has come up with a novel – if cringeworthy – way of making a bit of spare cash.
WikiLeaks has decided to supplement its running costs, as well as its leader’s mounting legal bills, by putting up 10 initial lots on auction site eBay.
These include WikiLeaks hardware and copies of ‘spying’ cables, all the way down to a sachet of coffee that Mr Assange managed to swipe from the canteen at Wandsworth Prison.
It is the first of four fundraisers aimed at recovering money lost in a backlash move by Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Western Union – which all refused to process payments to WikiLeaks.
Ironically, the eBay items are using PayPal, Visa and Mastercard among their methods of payment.
Each item is accompanied on eBay by the type of star-struck blurb usually reserved for items once belonging to such icons as Elvis or Marilyn Monroe.
For example, the accompanying description for the coffee sachet – easily the auction’s most risible item – breathlessly exclaims that it is a ‘scarce item of memorabilia from Julian Assange’s time in prison’.
It continues: ‘Julian Assange spent ten days in prison in December 2010. When he left to go under house arrest in Norfolk he smuggled out this, one of three sachets of coffee.’
Unfortunately, it provides no further information of exactly how Mr Assange smuggled the item from the prison.
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