Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks | Hacker News Reader

Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959697 - techdirt.com

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959633 - arstechnica.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959607 - bgr.com

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959328 - guardian.co.uk

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959305 - reuters.com

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959142 - foxnews.com

This was a bad move on Amazon's part. We expect Joe Lieberman to be a horror.

But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be yanked at any time? Kinda of a Godaddy/nodaddy type situation? (I use both Amazon (EC2) and Godaddy (domains) products)

Granted this was a pretty big case but I think situations like this either affirm or enhance trust in a third party platform/provider. If Amazon had relented and kept hosting, it would have spoke volumes on customer dedication.

Of course they probably didn't like the DDoS attacks constantly.

It wasn't wikileaks that did the actions or stole the information. They just posted it. In this day and age of tepid media for profit and intertwined news organizations with gov't/business, real news like wikileaks is needed.

This is an attack on the messenger.

People who care can vote with their cash. I doubt many will.

Note: I generally agree with the leaking of relevant government data to expose abuses.

> "But doesn't this put fear into cloud service users that their stuff can be yanked at any time?"

Not really. Illegal content already puts you at risk of getting yanked at any time. If you were hosting pirated material or anything else that is illegal in the jurisdiction of the host, it can be yanked.

This is not a judgment on whether or not said content ought to be illegal, but rather a simple statement that nothing has changed.

That being said, I am uncomfortable with this sort of thing having no set procedure, and being instigated/pressured upon by government officials. We have a clear process for DMCA takedowns, and likewise a request to remove illegal information needs to come from law enforcement within their jurisdiction, and not from self-interested politicians.

Do we have a clear declaration that this content is illegal? I wasn't aware we did.

You're right. I've always been under the impression that dissemination of classified material is illegal as part of the Espionage Act.

But a quick jaunt over Wikipedia is inconclusive. It seems the legality of these leaks is a lot less cut and dry than I thought.

If only we had courts and judges to handle this sort of thing! The government could file a complaint, a team of legal experts could take a look at the evidence, Wikileaks could present materials and arguments in their defense, and a final decision could be made. If Wikileaks' content was ruled illegal, then this court could send Amazon a letter asking them to remove the content. Amazon could, of course, appeal. Once the appeals process was exhausted, then they could be compelled to remove the offending material. (Not all of it, of course; only the material that the court deems "illegal", whatever that means.)

The whole process could be open and transparent, and nobody would have any grounds to complain or yell "conspiracy!"

Oh yeah, but they're terrorists, so they don't deserve freedom. Much better to punish them in private, so nobody knows what is and is not illegal. Then when the government doesn't like you, they can take whatever action they want against you, with no oversight! That would be a much better system! Potatolicious, you could say.

They at least have copyright infringement, and could probably get a big enough fine to shut down wikileaks.

US (federal) Government documents are not entitled to copyright protection within America.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105

That depends on how much of the data is strictly government property. If any of it is was written by contractors, etc. it may still have that avenue.

Any work derived by government contract is also not covered by copyright.

I was under the impression government materials are not protected by copyright. Even if they were the public interest argument (fair use) would trump copyright in this case.

The stuff hosted by wikileaks is not illegal. A lot of people would like it to be, but it is not. There have been a number of articles yesterday going into this in great depth.

Ultimately 9 Justices in the Supreme Court determine that. If Gonzales v. Raich or Kelo v. City of New London are any indication I'm fairly sure they can come up with the legal gymnastics required to make these documents illegal given the current law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

That is an eminent domain case and a fungible goods case.

I'd go for this one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_vs_Ferguson

To me when someone makes a bad move, it's when it hurts their efforts, whether their efforts are for the greater good, or not. So unless this is hurting Amazon's bottom line or the goals of the executives, I wouldn't call it a bad move. Your comment doesn't seem to address that.

I'm chalking this one up as an evil move, but not necessarily a bad move for them.

No, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part. Most of the populace understands wikileaks to be bad, engaged in killing soldiers, letting terrorists escape, etc. Most of the populace thinks that national secrets are a good idea. When you can lose a lot of business, be harassed by the US Senate, etc, it's probably a good idea to let a single customer go.

Yes lots of nerds and those concerned about liberty will be upset. However, when we want to make a purchase online or host some infrastructure we'll probably still use Amazon.

> Most of the populace understands wikileaks to be bad, engaged in killing soldiers, letting terrorists escape, etc.

We do? Huh? Amazon, typical of any big corporation caved in an effort to protect their number on priority: the bottom line. Cowards.

What does Amazon have to gain from hosting the files? They are not a political organization...they are a business. Businesses make decisions based on business principles. It's not that tough to understand.

Most of the populace understands wikileaks to be bad, engaged in killing soldiers, letting terrorists escape, etc.

So you're saying most of the populace is woefully ill informed? Agreed.

It's being reported that the US gov (read: Joe Lieberman) pressured Amazon to stop hosting the site.

Here is a more thorough update on this situation: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-websit...

government censorship of dissenters...China would be proud.

this is actually pretty stupid on their part, it's the equivalent of locking the barn after the animals escaped.

Joe Lieberman can call for whatever he wants. It's his right under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

A Senator calling for a web host to take down a site no more constitutes "government censorship" than a Senator calling for pickles not to be put on hamburgers constitutes "food and drug regulation". Down with Wikileaks! Down with pickles!

The Constitution simply does not give individual Senators the power to censor websites, or, for that matter, all Senators en masse the power to circumvent the Constitution without having that action overturned by SCOTUS.

China would be embarrassed --- perhaps murderously --- if its censorship apparatus was this much of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

All thing being equal, sure, but I think it's obvious that Joe Lieberman calling for a site to be taken down is considerably different than you or I saying the same thing.

Being a member of the most powerful people in the most powerful country in the world always affords you powers not directly enumerated in the constitution.

As a simple counter-example, imagine if a sitting US Senator advised the public not to do business with black people. It can be hard to distinguish the personal opinions of a government official from the edicts of his office.

I don't see the parallel; calling for people not to do business with black people is absolutely indefensible; Lieberman would have a civil right to do so, but might also be impeached as a result.

What about French people? Remember "Freedom Fries"?

Are you seriously suggesting that "Freedom Fries" is as serious as an open appeal to racism? You can have the last word; I'm done here.

You're assuming, of course, that there weren't veiled (or otherwise) threats of legislation or investigations that would make Amazon.com suffer commercially.

Yes, that is what I am assuming.

While unfortunate, I don't necessarily fault Amazon here. Amazon is a shopping website first, cloud computing platform second. I do find Joe Lieberman calling for a boycott of an American company reprehensible though.

Agreed 100%.

Seems like Lieberman chose some low-hanging anti-anything-anit-America fruit to bolster his relevancy. It's pretty transparent.

I find Joe Lieberman reprehensible

Not for long. They've said the cloud should start making more money than the shopping shortly...

I imagine the margins are better and material handling costs much less.

But it does show the Achilles heel of cloud computing. Is it wise to depend on 3 American companies that have other interests to protect? The potential cloud computing oligopoly could be bad for freedom and openness on the net.

The vagueness of the term "cloud" could help the cloud oligopolists. There could be hundreds of so-called clouds, with all but a few of them being brokers for the real cloud service providers. Then it would take a couple sentences to point out the situation. Not good. :(

Is there an official way to mirror wikileaks data, just to help in the event the public internet presence (they're also available on .onion, iirc) is somehow taken down? I have the cryptic "insurance.aes256" file from earlier this year, but is there any way normal users can help back up readble parts of wikileaks?

http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html

That IP address is just wikileaks - the DNS is down for me currently is all.

This is truly fascinating. I wonder to what extent things would have played out differently were there not the looming threat of a boycott during the holiday shopping season.

And to think I wrote this less than 14 hours ago, trying to sound all ominous and dramatic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957467

:-)

This scenario is where my previously discussed startup idea would do really well - if someone could pull it off - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla...

A completely distributed web host, hosted on people's machines. A lot more difficult to shut down (although, I guess if enough government pressure was put on some local chokepoint, it could be a problem). But if it was designed in such a way, as to mitigate these issues - it could be very powerful....imho that is :)

Freenet is basically what you describe, and it's free.

That's very interesting. Thanks for that link. Will look into it.

I was more thinking of a commercial product/platform that could be used for a variety of reasons.

So what is the only anti-dote to a DDOS right now? A bigger pipe...no?

Well imagine having a service that you can 'spin up' any number of nodes/machines to intercept all those packets. I am not sure how the economics would work, but in order for it to be a good service with good support it would have to be commercial - not an open source project.

The only issue with that is that if there is one company, it makes it easier for major governments to try and get their hands on it. So for WikiLeaks case, it might not be completely helpful, but imagine the many other cases where popular/large sites are hit by constant DDOSs. I think there could be significant use there. Especially as high-speed & fibre connections become more prevalent and latency (around the world) comes down even further than it has over the years.

Just my $0.02.

The lack of an official response from Amazon is telling. I wonder if DHS just gave Amazon an ultimatum along the lines of host wikileaks and we'll raid your servers. (Also the DHS/Amazon communication, if there was any, is probably classified so Amazon can't even mention it).

Our government has come a long way since 2000.

I think the only way wikileaks can stay alive over the long term is probably through torrents, the combo punch of govn't takedowns and constant DDoS attacks probably doesn't make hosting a website feasible. It would make more sense to release it in digest as a torrent, right?

Everyone appears to be assuming it's for political reasons. Quite possible, but it doesn't seem like there was any serious pressure so far and there could be lots of other reasons. ("Hey, our shared infrastructure is being DoS-ed because of you")

I feel sorry for Amazon lately, thrust into Catch 22s left and right. I'm guessing that in addition to political concerns hosting Wikileaks would put a huge target on their backs from cyber attackers. That's probably the additional justification they needed to make this call.

so is amazon going to even attempt to frame this as a terms-of-service violation? not a peep so far.

Like most hosting TOSes, theirs is written so they can boot you if they find you inconvenient, without a specific violation on your part. They say they can terminate service when (among other possibly applicable points):

we determine, in our sole discretion, that our provision of any of the Services to you is prohibited by applicable law, or has become impractical or unfeasible for any legal or regulatory reason

— http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ 3.4.1 (viii)

They would have a fair point that, even if it isn’t illegal, dealing with an investigation and bad publicity isn’t worth their time.

For what it’s worth, I certainly wish they stood up at least until they were under specific legal threat. But they never advertised themselves as a data haven.

I have a feeling that 'Amazon's privacy policy forbids discussing reasons why customers were terminated with 3rd parties'

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