Don't boycott amazon because of WikiLeaks. | Hacker News Reader

Don't boycott amazon because of WikiLeaks.

blog.mathgladiator.com

16 pointsmathgladiator22 comments

Flagged. Calling Assange a "homeless beggar who wants to take a shit on your carpet" adds nothing at all to the debate.

Amazon has every right to turn WL away. That they chose to do so is, IMO, unfortunate, for the reasons laid out here:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-fi...

but that's their choice to make.

And if people who wish Amazon had done otherwise want to spend their dollars elsewhere, well, that's their choice to make, too.

Whenever I see one of these "boycott Amazon" threads I wonder whether that person would be so brave if FBI agents showed up at their door. Because that's what happened to Amazon here. A very powerful Senator showed up at their door and essentially gave them a choice between dropping WikiLeaks for trying to fend off every possible attack the Government could throw at them. Jeff Bezos was faced with questions like "can the web services business survive if we have to fight the U.S. Government" and "how many people are going to lose their jobs because of the business slow down caused by this"

While on the other side all WikiLeaks has to do is go to bittorrent or the NY Time and they can still get the information out.

"That person" isn't Jeff Bezos, though. Jeff Bezos has been in many tough negotiating positions before, and it's at times like that when one's character is tested. Your proverbial "boycott Amazon person" is likely not going to have their character tested on point regarding Wikileaks, but that can't stop opinion or in, for lack of a better phrase, voting with their hopes. There are a lot of people that wish Amazon didn't accede to becoming a proxy for government censorship and hope that they wouldn't do the same. Bezos wimped out.

FTA: WikiLeaks right now is a giant pile of shit from a legal standpoint

What law has WikiLeaks broken?

More specifically, what law can be applied to WikiLeaks that cannot be applied to NYT, The Guardian and the other media that is publishing the leaks?

Also, how many laws have been broken by governments (the US and many others) as is reported in the leaks?

More than likely, they'll be charged with the violation of these, as well as numerous digital laws. They'll do anything possible to make charges stick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Three_of_the_United_Sta...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917

Eric Holder has publicly said that he's considering pursuing the charges over the Espionage Act.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Three_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_3:_Treason

How can he (Assange) be accused of treason if he is not American and doesn't live in the US? By definition treason is only against your own country.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917

Assange got the documents from someone else, as the NYT did. Why is WikiLeaks or Assange charged with espionage while NYT isn't?

> More specifically, what law can be applied to WikiLeaks

Doesn't matter if it is protected or not; Amazon doesn't want to find out nor deal with it.

How do you contrast the Wikileaks situation with other organizations like the NY Times?

If somebody came, exclusively, to the Times with 251,287 stolen / leaked cables, would they have published them all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers

Notably Wikileaks has released only a small amount of the 251,287 cables, and while the US government refused to vet the cables from Wikileaks, they did vet them when the NYT asked them too.

According to Wikipedia, so far they have released less than 1%.

In the Netherlands news agencies are developing search tools to make it more manageable. Something like: http://cablesearch.org/

"If Amazon gets sued and bankrupt, then I'm absolutely fucked."

is this really the core issue here?

For amazon's business model, yes.

Amazon doesn't have a philosophical goal, they are a business with customers. One customer's goal is another customer's nightmare. Amazon has to be a balancing force between everyone's computing needs.

This was probably a marketing decision. Do they want the PR challenge of supporting wikileaks? I doubt it. Either way, they are screwed from a PR point of view. They just took the safer option for the business rather than an ideological one (which seems like an ideological one, but it is more business centric).

What would happen if they didn't took steps?

Honestly, probably nothing. The ideal step would have been to turn a blind-eye, but when you have lawyers and marketers....

It was enough to mention Wikileaks on a post about Amazon at Hacker News to get plenty of downvotes. And I don't see how anything other than a court decision should make the hosting service provider to selectively discontinue the service to some of its customers. Hosting providers should not censor proactively.

Amazon simply proved that their "cloud" services are subject to corporate (= unregulated) censorship, and cannot be relied upon. What's worse, they proved that their services may have zero availability and no scalability at all precisely when the customer really needs them.

It is not censorship to stop hosting someone who is violating several points of your terms of service. Wikileaks only got on Amazon in the first place because Amazon has an automated sign up, which can be abused.

I doubt very much there is going to be any significant boycott at all.

Firstly, I don't see where you get that Wikileaks is "like a homeless beggar," because they are paying for everything (in more ways than one). This is more like a lunch counter metaphor: the proprietor should be able choose who he will sell to. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

Secondly, your solution depends on streaming bittorrent, which to my knowledge doesn't really exist yet.

Dude: wait, what???

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