BANKS AND WIKILEAKS

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a
crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its
disclosure of confidential State Department communications.
Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.

Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they
would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier
this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that
WikiLeaks may be doing things that are "inconsistent with our
internal policies for processing payments."

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other
companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to
open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable
risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye
out for some shady businesses - like drug dealing and money
laundering - and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank's ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a
troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any
organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially
cutting them off from the world economy.

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business.
They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that
governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit
guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public
utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse
phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing
that it amounts to risky business.

Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This
isn't the first time a bank shunned a business on similar
risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have
refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the
organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next
year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial
industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive
of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a
particularly irksome blogger or other organization was "too risky"?
What if they decided - one by one - to shut down financial access to
a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their
operations? This decision should not be left solely up to
business-as-usual among the banks.