4.50pm: Big news: MasterCard confirms that its SecureCode payments system is in trouble, issuing this statement: Please be advised that MasterCard SecureCode Support has detected a service disruption to the MasterCard Directory Server. The Directory Server service has been failed over to a secondary site however customers may still be experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. More information on the estimated time of recovery will be shared in due course.

4.46pm: Regarding Politico’s attempts to cast the male lead to play Julian Assange in WikiLeaks: The Movie – the obvious choice is the CPS barrister from Law & Order: UK, Ben Daniels. Plus, he’s from Nuneaton.

4.37pm: Political scientist Henry Farrell has this smart take on the implications for WikiLeaks on the limits and extent of state power, on his Monkey Cage blog:

US political pressure caused Amazon to stop hosting WikiLeaks, EveryDNS to break Wikileaks.org’s domain name, eBay/Paypal to stop facilitating financial transactions, Swiss Post to freeze a WikiLeaks bank account (in perhaps the first instance in recorded history of a Swiss bank taking residency requirements seriously), and Mastercard and Visa to cease relations with it. This is unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked. But it may plausibly affect the medium and long run viability of WikiLeaks as an organization. This will be a very interesting battle to watch.

So: yes, the horse may be out of the stable this time – but the US wants the door firmly bolted to keep the others locked inside.

4.26pm: The article mentioned below at 4.21pm also mentions this fact: the domain name wikileaks.com is owned by Wikipedia. That’s right: Wikipedia, not WikiLeaks. Keeping it safe?

4.21pm: Has the attempts to take down WikiLeaks actually made it stronger? It seems that way based on this analysis of how WikiLeaks and the internet has responded to the various threats against it.