Open Letter To Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Open Letter To Amazon

ellsberg.net

24 pointsherrherr32 comments

Sorry, but all this crap is getting on my nerves. If it were my business I would have done the same thing. I don't care what your views on Wikileaks are, losing money and being shutdown due to violation of the Espionage Act is not something that sits well with investors, and would certainly affect the business model. If you don't like it, start a competing service in a country that isn't negatively impacted by the leaks. Good luck with that.

I don't agree. If there is a company that could stand up against such threats of government, it would be Amazon. I would have loved to see this played out in court.

Although I do understand that for Amazon's business it's better to minimize all risk, it would have been nice if they stood up for free speech.

I believe that even when you're operating a business you should still have ethics. Perhaps even more so. There lots of shady things you could do to lower your expenses without actually breaking a law. But you still wouldn't do them, right? Because you feel they are WRONG. Why didn't Amazon see this as a wrong thing to do?

Because it was the right thing to do, in their eyes and many others, and they have every right to do it. Rebecca MacKinnon enunciates this well here: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/02/mackinnon.wikileak...

While Rebecca does discuss that they have the right to do it, I think you're distorting her point.

"While Amazon was within its legal rights, the company has nonetheless sent a clear signal to its users: If you engage in controversial speech that some individual members of the U.S. government don't like -- even if there is a strong case to be made that your speech is constitutionally protected -- Amazon is going to dump you at the first sign of trouble....

The future of freedom in the internet age may well depend on whether we the people can succeed in holding companies that now act as arbiters of the public discourse accountable to the public interest."

Wikileaks can feel free to use our startup's services all they want. I'm not releasing server logs or user data without court order.

If the US government starts shutting down tech businesses due to their users political activities, I'm sure that will be better press than I could ever hope to pay for. No senators will want it on their record that they are destroying small businesses to play politics.

Would the US Government shut down Amazon over this? I highly doubt it.

Everyone here realizes that businesses exist to make profits. That isn't something anyone here is in the dark about - our point is more that with all channels that enable free speech going through SOME business intermediary (in this case Amazon), there are few places left to actually exercise that right when everyone just falls back on the catch-all excuse of profits or appeasing investors.

Also, you are making quite the assumption when you say "...in a country that isn't negatively impacted by the leaks."

Yea ok, it's your company, you decide. (But don't give me the 'would have been shut down', I really doubt Lieberman would have shut down Amazon).

But then we, as consumers, shall decide not to do more business with your company.

Quite timely this happening now -- I would have bought a lot of Christmas presents on Amazon. Now I'll be taking my business elsewhere.

It is true that Amazon has acted cowardly and succumbed to political pressure in the Wikileaks case.

However, I believe it is in their interest to take such action. What incentive do they have (or should they have) to protect free speech?

Amazon is a public company which operates for profit and reports to its stockholders. In terms of minimizing risk of future litigation - this move is absolutely necessary, and very understandable.

Seriously. Amazon is not a charity organization... they exist to make a profit. ANYONE that threatens that will get removed from their services. This is why you can't fire up a DDoS cluster on their services. Anyone that has the ability to affect the rest of their paying customers or the core business needs to get cut off.

This must be why they went to bat to defend a book about Pedophilia, specifically citing first amendment rights.

Edit: Not sure why this is being voted down. If you argue that Amazon is only acting in their best interests, pointing out that their behavior is wildly inconsistent is valid.

But then they pulled that book too, right? I thought that result also ended up as censorship.

The point of a boycott is to give them -- and other companies -- incentive to act less cowardly.

But are more people going to boycott them for not hosting WL than would have boycotted them for hosting it?

Excellent question. I'm sure Amazon's executives and shareholders are wondering the same thing.

I'm not sure about the US (polls show most people here are against Wikileaks), but internationally I think it could hurt them badly.

They would get free publicity? "Wikileaks attacked but Amazon's infrastucture was able to handle the DDOS and serve the site"

Amazon can't win.

It was only a few weeks ago they were facing threats of boycott from the public because of an e-book they were hosting that was deemed wrong by many. They buckled to the pressure and removed the book.

Now, once again, Amazon are faced with hosting something that people disagree with. But this time they are facing threats of boycott because they have taken the content down.

Very first sentence of AWS Service Terms:

1. Universal Service Terms (Applicable to All Services) 1.1. You may only use the Services to store, retrieve, query, serve, and execute Your Content that is owned, licensed or lawfully obtained by you.

http://aws.amazon.com/serviceterms/

I'm not a fan, but they made those terms for a reason. This is simply Amazon enforcing the rules that they set in place a long time ago. Wikileaks should have read the terms before they signed up.

According to a Q&A with Assange:

"Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assa...

I think that the hosting with Amazon was more a PR move than anything.

Nice catch. This makes more sense, to be honest, than Assange making a mistake as gross as hosting in the US.

How do the documents fall under the category of unlawfully obtained?

And if they are considered unlawfully obtained (to which I've seen no evidence), would Amazon kick the NYTimes off their servers if the NYTimes hosted the documents there?

Ellsberg's book "Secrets" is a great read, describing his evolution and eventual decision to smuggle out the Xerox copies of the Pentagon Papers.

In 2008 when I was helping organize the Get FISA Right protests on my.barackobama.com, some email went across the list from somebody named Daniel Ellsberg. I sent him mail saying "you probably get this all the time, but by any chance are you the Daniel Ellsberg?" Much to my delight, it was, and we struck up an email conversation. Wow!

As much as it disgusts me that they would cave to political pressure, you have to make a choice between running a business and becoming embroiled in politics.

Free speech is great, but if the management of Amazon wants to do anything to protect that they'd do far better by doing so unattached to the Amazon brand. That is, if all they're interested in is money and the success of their business: something I suspect.

The only thing which annoys me about Amazon is that they didn't just say it how it is. (Or so I suspect.)

edit; Having said that, on a personal level I agree with the OP. I have no interest in supporting a company run by people that do not care for my values. They are far more important to me than a few savings here and there.

In this case Amazon couldn't avoid making a choice.

Hosting Wikileaks is a political action; deciding not to host Wikileaks is a political action.

I agree, though: they would have looked a lot more honest if they had just said that they were doing it as a business decision.

Wikileaks is under ddos. Amazon makes a ton of money during the Christmas holidays on their platform. ECS would have needed to redirect sysadmins from their normal tasks to monitor and segregate traffic to prevent any impact to their primary business.

Regardless of whether it is free speech or not, things that are detrimental to their primary business or impact other clients, violate their T&C. I would have turfed them too.

The attack is politically motivated. You don't see anyone attacking tpb because they maintain a tracker link to the 1.3tb archive. The attack is specifically against the domain, causing wikileaks to jump around from provider to provider. The attack doesn't prevent the data from being distributed. Four newspapers already had complete copies - one of which hired 12-14 people to write an interface in Django to collate and categorize.

The DDOS does nothing but prevent the people that want to casually see what the fuss is about from seeing it.

If you're that concerned that the information should be free, grab the 1.3tb copy and host it. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Amazon's statement makes it very clear that they had no problem with the DDOS aspect of it and they ejected Wikileaks because of the nature of the content they are hosting:

http://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/

Wikileaks is a Whistle Blower. Govt must protect Wikileaks.

I am surprised that none of the commenters so far have compared Amazon's actions with Wikileaks to the opposite actions that they took with that Pedophile book.

You beat me to it - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966038

well, I guess that if wikileaks was indeed the agent of some foreign anti-american or anti-west rogue state, like many anti-wikileaks analysts, imply, they should have no problem hosting in that country, right? if they only host in the US and Europe, it means to me that they are clearly a manifestation of our own occidental political contradictions. do I make any sense?

Yes, don't buy your Christmas presents from Amazon!

Damn, just bought a Kindle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com