A new coalition of transparency advocates have come together to provide a new way for donors to give money to WikiLeaks and like-minded groups using traditional methods, including credit cards, PayPal and others. The move is the latest way WikiLeaks has been poking holes in its financial blockade.

The newly-minted Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) acts essentially as a shielded middleman for getting money to WikiLeaks, MuckRock, the National Security Archive, and more. On Monday, the group said on Twitter that after more than 24 hours of being up, it received $35,000 in donations.

“What this means is that on people's credit card bills, it will say Freedom of the Press Foundation,” said Micah Lee, the group’s chief technology officer, during a Monday conference call with reporters. “PayPal won't know how much of that goes to WikiLeaks or anyone else.”

Trevor Timm, one of the group’s co-founders and an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said during the same call the “lion's share is going to WikiLeaks.”

While donating to WikiLeaks is certainly the headline act here, some see it as a way to get more attention to similar organizations.

“While it's getting a lot of attention for the WikiLeaks aspect, I think it could be huge for small indy organizations in the future,” Jillian York, the director for International Freedom of Expression at the EFF, told Ars.

“I know that they're eventually planning to reach out to international organizations too, many of which are prohibited from sites like Kickstarter. Ultimately, I think what's great about this is the mechanism, though—a user might go to the site initially because they want to give to WikiLeaks but end up contributing to a smaller, lesser known organization, which could make all the difference.”

What do John Cusack and Xeni Jardin have in common?

When someone donates via the FPF website, the group provides a slide-style interface for donors to choose how much cash to give to any of its target groups. The FPF takes eight percent of each donation to pay back its own costs.

By acting as an umbrella organization for all the groups, the FPF hopes to increase ease-of-use and privacy for donors, and make it easier for groups like WikiLeaks to bypass being hit with a financial blockade.

“When you donate, we will store the amount of your donation, the distribution of organizations you wish to send money to, and your payment processor's transaction ID,” the group says in its privacy policy. “We won't associate this donation with your identity in our database; however it could possibly be tracked back to you through your payment processor.”

The FPF has a number of free speech luminaries on its board, including Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s), Glenn Greenwald (an attorney and journalist), John Cusack (yes, the actor!), John Perry Barlow (who co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Xeni Jardin (a journalist and co-founder of Boing Boing), and others.

“We started with the idea that WikiLeaks is not only a legitimate journalistic enterprise, but an essential one,” Ellsberg said on the same conference call. “We don't want to see it go down under government pressure. It's now an indispensable part of journalism.”