Just last week someone asked on HN "what are the legal consequences of donating to an organization that is branded a "terrorist organization"? Can you be punished retroactively?"

I replied that yes, you can, and you should not expect rationality or good faith from these people, only savagery. I was down-voted into oblivion. This filled me with confidence, so I donated that very day. Later that afternoon, Paypal caved. Evidently I was the last straw. ;)

Ya the same here. I donated when Paypal caved and then I donated again when MasterCard caved. Between that and my vocal opposition to the new TSA policies I'm pretty sure I'm on every list the government has at this point /tinfoil hat.

I'm with you man, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. I cast my fate to the wind years ago. And by the way, I think the use of tin foil is highly underrated and needlessly ridiculed.

What I want to know is, why should harmless fuzz-balls like us have to worry about anything in life? We are but simple people, minding our own business in honest toil, needing only our daily ration of beer and bread. Now if I could just write that with an Irish accent.

I assume you can still donate to NORAID with your mastercard?

All of us little old England are so glad we have never experienced any terrorist attacks before 911

I'm too young to have remembered, but seems Noraid was a largely US-funded charity alleged to have paid for weapons for use by republican groups in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID

oh please don't bring the Notch stuff into this. FYI they were entirely justified with what they did. I administrate the Minecraft forums, there were (and still are) many legitimate complaints from people who paid for the game but never got access because minecraft.net is very poorly built[1]. When his account received millions of dollars in a tiny period of time with numerous complaints do you really think any legitimate company would just give him the money?

What they did in his situation was entirely justified and I'd personally suggest it was exactly what they should have done. I'm sure there are many times when Paypal have done wrong, but this really isn't one of them.

[1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=91042

Also: Everyone talks about them "freezing" his account or stealing his money, when they did no such thing. They're simply requiring him to keep a float in his Paypal account to cover chargebacks, and due to the amount of transactions he gets, that float has to be an unusually large amount.

They're requiring that now. At the time, they froze the account, allowing money in but no withdrawals.

At a point in time when it was unclear to Paypal whether or not all of the money was fraudulently obtained and was going to be charged back, that action seems perfectly reasonable.

I still don't have access. I emailed someone, got no response, so I gave up on it.

hey :-) Send an email to Daniel ([email protected]) and he should sort you out. If not send me an email ([email protected]) and when he's next online I'll poke him into helping you out.