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In her first interview since leaving Moscow for Berlin last month, Harrison told German news weekly Stern: "How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?"
Harrison was referring to the decision in December 2010 by PayPal, which is owned by eBay, to suspend WikiLeaks' donation account and freeze its assets after pressure from the US government. The company's boycott, combined with similar action taken by Visa and Mastercard, left WikiLeaks facing a funding crisis.
"His excuse is probably that there is nothing he could have done at the time," Harrison continued. "Well, he is on the board of directors. He can't shake off responsibility that easily. He didn't even comment on it. He could have said something like: 'we were forced to do this, but I am against it'."
Harrison joined WikiLeaks from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and worked with the organisation on the Afghan war logs and leaked cables projects. She now works on the WikiLeaks legal defence team, although she has no legal qualifications, and was catapulted to fame when she accompanied Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, on his flight from Hong Kong to Russia in June 2013.
Referring to Omidyar's plans to set up a new media organisation, in which the former Guardian writer Greenwald – who wrote a number of stories from the Snowden revelations – will play a central part, Harrison said: "If you set up a new media organisation which claims to do everything for press freedom, but you are part of a blockade against another media organisation, then that's hard for us to take it seriously. But I hope that they stick to their promises".
Harrison also suggests that Omidyar could have carried the legal costs of the 14 Anonymous hacktivists who were sent to prison for attacking PayPal over the boycott. "That would have been a nice gesture".
On Thursday, 11 of the so-called "PayPal 14" pleaded guilty in a court in California to one felony count of conspiracy and one misdemeanour count of damaging a computer. They stood accused of organising a "distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS) attack, knocking PayPal's servers offline by overloading them with traffic in 2010, causing what the company estimated to be $5.5m of damage.
Two of the remaining defendants did not take the plea bargain offered, and pleaded guilty only to the misdemeanour charge, meaning they will be required to serve a 90-day jail term. The final defendant, Dennis Collins, did not attend the hearing as he was in Virginia facing similar charges over attacks on other websites at the same time.
In January, four British members of Anonymous were sentenced for the same campaign. Chris Weatherhead was given an 18-month sentence, Ashley Rhodes was handed a seven-month jail sentence, Peter Gibson was given a six month suspended sentence, and 18-year-old Jake Burchall was given an 18 month youth rehabilitation order.
Omidyar, however, argues that the tools used in a DDoS attack render them "vastly different than other forms of protest".
"The problem in this case," he wrote on the Huffington Post website on 3 December, "is that the tools being distributed by Anonymous are extremely powerful. They turn over control of a protester's computer to a central controller which can order it to make many hundreds of web page requests per second to a target website.
"It's like each protester can bring along 6,000 phantom friends without going to the trouble of convincing each of them to take an afternoon off and join the protest in the street."
But the eBay founder said that the law was too hard on the 14 defendants in the case. "It would be unjust to hold fourteen people accountable for the actions of a thousand… Each person should be accountable for the damage they personally caused.
Source : theguardian.com
