Apple Pulls Wikileaks iPhone App

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Ever since the Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables up on their site for everyone to see, traditional companies have been trying to disassociate themselves from the whistle-blowing wiki. In rapid order, Wikileaks lost the support of its host, Amazon, their DNS provider, PayPal, and MasterCard.

Now Apple’s App Store Review Team has . But is it censorship?

Before the app was pulled, the Wikileaks app description read:

The Wikileaks app gives instant access to the world’s most documented leakage of top secret memos and other confidential government documents You can now have all of the sensitive WikiLeaks data easily available on your iPhone.

There’s no word as to why, exactly, the App Store Review Team pulled the Wikileaks app. Charitably, it could be because Wikileaks is a non-profit organization, and by charging for their information, the developer fell afoul of Cupertino. But there’s numerous app front ends for services like Wikipedia (I’m particularly enamored of Wikipanion Plus that do the same thing, charging for a more convenient way to navigate publicly available information put out by a non-profit.

So what’s the real deal? It’s unknown, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the app was pulled Apple just didn’t want to step in the Wikileaks mess at all. Personally, I can’t say I would entirely blame them.

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