Amazon, why block WikiLeaks!
Most people were left unhappy with Amazon Web Service (AWS) after abruptly kicking Wikileaks off its Cloud-hosting platform. Another company believed to have blocked WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, from using is its services is Paypal.
Amazon removed WikiLeaks' website from its EC2 cloud on Thursday, after
Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) ' the chairman of the Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs committee ' complained about U.S. companies
helping to distribute what he called illegal documents.
On Thursday night Amazon released a statement saying the US government did not play part in any of the decisions which lead to Wikileaks being kicked off its Cloud-hosting platform.
A few hours after Wikileaks got kicked off Amazon, the site moved to another hosting provider based deep within the Swedish mountains. Site was back online for just a few hours before it got taken offline again, this time by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.com. The DNS provider stated that Wikileaks' website was being attacked by hackers using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which risked affecting other customers. Julian Assange and his team then moved the site to a server host in Switzerland, the site was back online on Friday.
Why should the world care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher - a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless - and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves to be protection. Yet others may think WikiLeaks degenerates into gossip.
The US government itself can't take official action to silence WikiLeaks' ongoing publications - that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint, or censorship of speech before it can be communicated to the public. No government actor can nix WikiLeaks' right to publish content any more than the government could stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, which were also stolen secret government documents.
- In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. -
While it's frustrating to think of any hosting provider cutting services to a website because it considers the content too politically volatile or controversial, it's especially disheartening to see Amazon knuckle under to pressure from a single senator. Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon.
