WikiLeaks: We Need a Million Bucks, Stat

WikiLeaks needs "a minimum" of a million euros ASAP in order to "effectively continue its mission," it announced in a news release today. The anti-secrecy organization has seen its cash reserves plummet from around $983,600 in December 2010 to less than $120,000 at the end of June, and that reserve will dwindle to nothing "within a few months," it said, according to the Wall Street Journal. It blames these financial woes on Visa and MasterCard's joint ban on the site.

WikiLeaks says it has at last figured out a workaround for would-be donors with Visa and MasterCard, saying they can send donations through France's Carte Bleue system, which in turn would route the donations through France's Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality, a nonprofit organization, the AP reports. Carte Bleue has a contract with Visa and MasterCard forbidding them from cutting off merchants. "Let them shut it down," Julian Assange said in statement. "We're waiting. Our lawyers are waiting." (More WikiLeaks stories.)