Organizations that fight for human rights and civil liberties often (unwittingly) install a donation mechanism that counters their own cause. This creates a pitfall whereby donors contribute to opposing interests. This graph exposes the problem:

Examples

Erowid

When Erowid accepts a PayPal donation, a portion of the donation feeds corporations that impose drug tests on staff. This obviously undermines the values of Erowid readers. Erowid readers embrace the lifestyle that drug-testing policies discriminate against.

When Erowid was confronted with the problem, they chose to block their critic instead of giving any thought to damage they are causing. As of this writing, Erowid still accepts PayPal donations.

Tor

The mission of the Tor project is to protect human rights by facilitating improved privacy. When Tor Project accepts a PayPal donation, this mission is undermined. Tor Project has enabled donations to sponsor CISPA supporting organizations. Organizations that attack freedom of press are supported by Tor Project donations, which perversely undermines the values of the donors.

Tor Project has a similar problem with their bitcoin mechanism because it makes use of BitPay (another company that works against their interests). This was raised as a ticket against the website. Notice the response from Sebastian was to close the ticket on the basis that "This is not really a website ticket". He obviously could have altered the category of the ticket as opposed to using this excuse to close and then insulting the intelligence of the Tor community.

Protonmail

Perhaps the most ironic charities that currently accepts PayPal is Protonmail. PayPal froze the account of Protonmail without warning, causing lost access to funds for a day or two (in 2014). Customers were also effectively blocked from clawing back their contributions (to send another way) as it would trigger chargeback fees against Protonmail. This enabled PayPal to sit on the funds and have exclusive constructive use of money meant as a donation to Protonmail, thus profiting from their DoS attack. Despite this deplorable act, Protonmail still today accepts PayPal donations, foolishly feeding a harmful adversary to them and the community. They should know better.

What's wrong with employment drug testing?

1. Lifestyle control
   Contrary to conventional wisdom, employment drug testing for marijuana does not detect impairment. It only detects lifestyle. When someone smokes at home after work, or on vacation in Colorado or Amsterdam, they will only be impaired for a couple hours but they will test positive for as long as six weeks. So when a company forces staff to submit their urine for inspection, this is to select lifestyles. It's to control behavior outside of the workplace.

2. Denial of medical treatment
   Many states permit doctors to be doctors, and prescribe medicinal marijuana when appropriate for a patient's condition. But these companies impose control over medical decisions of their staff, and across the board blocks treatments that people need. Effectively this enables companies put their culture and lifestyle preferences above (and to the detriment of) the workers health care.

3. Invasion of medical privacy
   The drug test inappropriately discloses sensitive medical information to the employer. Under more responsible (often European) regimes, it's only appropriate to disclose sensitive medical information to qualified doctors. Under such regimes, if a condition impairs a workers' ability to perform a particular task, it's the doctor who judges this. And rightly so. The doctor then must inform the employer simply that the patients condition (or treatments thereof) are incompatible with the work. This disclosure is handled in a responsible way that respects the worker's medical privacy. But not in regions where companies drug test their staff.

4. Discrimination against pregnancy
   Urine collected for the purposes of drug testing can be (and has been) used to test whether the employee or prospective employee is pregnant. It's often illegal. No one knows if Discovercard, American Express, or Mastercard is doing this - which is part of the problem. When someone hands over their urine they have no physical control over what is tested for. They generally cannot even choose the lab. They are expected to concede unconditional trust, despite the potential for abuse on the employers part. There is a built-in economical reward for employers who discover and avoid hiring pregnant women. And abuse has happened. The Washington D.C. police department admitted using drug tests to screen staff for pregnancy.

5. False-positives
   Testing has flaws. Positive urine will sometimes test negative, and clean urine will sometimes test positive (for example, if the mass spectrometer was not cleaned well between samples). This causes a certain percentage of applicants to be denied employment wrongly, and generally without legal recourse.

6. Unsafe workplace due to false-safety
   Managers improperly trust that drug tests will detect impairment. So they neglect to take actions that stand a chance to detect impairment, like a test of hand-eye coordination or motor skills. The false-security created by the misconception that the drug test detect impairment enables truly impaired workers to go unnoticed.

Consequences 1-4 have a strong impact against the causes that a charity like the Beckley Foundation works for. Yet Beckley Foundation accepts PayPal donations. Charitable organizations whose causes are damaged by drug testing policies include: Erowid, psychedemia, Aware Project, MAPS, The Psychedelic Society, Beckley Foundation, drugscience.org.uk and Jill Stein's campaign.

What's wrong with CISPA and CISA?

These bills reduce our freedom by way of unwarranted information sharing. Companies are required to collect and share information on non-criminals systemically. Companies are immune to remedial actions arising out of damage caused by over-sharing.

Charitable organizations whose causes are damaged by CISPA/CISA sponsorship include: i2p, Riseup, EFF, Tor Project, Inc., chatsecure, GnuPG, Tails, Courage Foundation, Democracy Now, and Jill Stein's campaign.

Self-harm isn't limited to overhead

When a good cause organization accepts PayPal, it signals that PayPal is an acceptable company to patronize. Contributors may opt to open a PayPal account as a result of their charity endorsing PayPal. The endorsement may encourage contributors to use PayPal for more commercial endeavors.

Solutions

• Organizations mentioned here should obviously stop accepting PayPal, and they should also state why. They have a duty to see that their principles are understood and upheld.
• Escrow services should create bounties. Contributors could donate to a 3rd party who then tells the charity money is available as soon as they agree to discontinue the use of PayPal. If no compliance before a deadline, the full contribution would be returned to the contributor.

Corrections to this article

• PayPal spun off of eBay in 2015. This article was originally written with obsolete information. Sorry! It's been corrected and more updates to come [e.g. bitcoin analysis].