HOW MUCH FREEDOM WILL EBAY FOUNDER’S MEDIA SITE ALLOW JOURNALISTS?

The Wikileaks staffer who accompanied NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to Russia has raised concerns about the $250-million media company that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is developing with Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter who first leaked some of the documents that Snowden spirited away from his former employer. In an interview with the German news weekly Stern, Sarah Harrison asked, “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 2010 by eBay-owned PayPal, along with Visa and Mastercard, to suspend Wikileaks’s accounts and freeze its assets. Harrison said that Omidyar refused even to comment on the PayPal decision. “He could have said something like: ‘we were forced to do this, but I am against it.'”