Can we use S3 and EC2 to host free speech? | Hacker News Reader

Can we use S3 and EC2 to host free speech?

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24 pointsdavewiner26 comments

Where would I move my sites? Do other vendors have a more clear statement of what they will and won't do under pressure from the US government?

I think that's the biggest issue here. I think it's clear that amazon bowed to US pressure (no matter what their public explanation was), but I imagine the number of ISPs that would stand by you while they were being called out on the senate floor would be vanishingly small.

We have a short list of companies that didn't stand by wikileaks, but ostracizing them while patronizing others simply because they didn't get tested seems unwise.

They pretty much all have at will terms in their contracts, so you basically have to rely on their will standing fast once the shit hits the fan.

As a hosting provider this seems to have been a horrible business decision on Amazon's part since now their customers are questioning their reliability. It actually doesn't make much sense especially considering the paranoid nature of many of their techie customers. Yes, Amazon has business before the Feds so they might have wanted to keep them happy up to a certain point, but this seems to have been a big rash decision if they were just acting on a phone call from Lieberman.

What I've been wondering, considering how quickly and strangely PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, also acted, if what really happened here was that they received some kind of National Security Letter. NSL's are subpoenas from the government that also include a gag order preventing you from talking about the letter. NSL's were supposedly ruled unconstitutional after the government had issued 192,499(!) of them, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are unknown unchallenged variations of the letter or loopholes that allow the government to still threaten businesses without them being able to talk about it or defend themselves.

We clearly can't rely on them for 'hotly contested speech' right now. At this moment this is more of a speech tax, as the speech has not yet been contained or suppressed. So you can still host speech you want free on S3 and EC2 as long as you have a plan B if some powerful speech eating weasel comes after you. This matters quite a bit in a practical sense because your pre-crisis approaches can leverage Amazon's low capital startup and recurring costs. Great so long as you don't wed yourself to approaches that only work there.

Of course, if we do all rely on it, it would become an even more obvious point of control and further suppress diversity in hosting as it is already doing in a major way. Diversity of hosts across jurisdictions, with diverse upstream providers is likely to provide surety that free speech will have hosts - but that suffers if we give all the unchallenged biz to Amazon.

I use heroku on EC2 and S3 quite a bit, and advised others to do so until this month. I was curious what they would say about process if someone tried to muscle me out; supposing Lieberman or Biden accept some MPAA inspired line of reasoning on copyright and seek to squash me or my clients to make some lobbyists happy, so I asked them:

http://kommons.com/questions/384

I don't much like Amazon dropping Wikileaks as a customer but so it goes. I still do business with them but there are some corporations that I don't. The larger issue is that empires in decline start acting strangely/poorly.

I had breakfast with several friends yesterday and we cover the political spectrum. We all agreed that our country (USA) is in a rapid state of decline. As individuals we all have our own strategies for coping with this.

Here's a space business opportunity: Launch an orbiting datacenter using a suitably recalcitrant "flag of convenience." Right now, the only country that could do anything about your Libertarian free-for-all orbital data-haven would be the US. You'd have to push things pretty far to have them take you out. I would advocate launching 3 hardened centers that mirror each other.

Would this be able to protect Wikileaks? Maybe. It depends on who the "flag of convenience" is. Child pr0n - probably not. (But I don't particularly mind if they can't find a haven.) Chinese dissidents? China might take a stab at taking all 3 centers out, but it would be pretty costly to them diplomatically.

I'm pretty sure if they couldn't make the financials work on an island you'd have a pretty hard time making them work for a power hungry space station.

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

I know very little about spacecraft and orbital jurisdiction so I won't go there but I'm tempted to suggest another idea.

With distributed network and storage in the private sector, eventually some corporation would seek out a jurisdiction neutral site from which to run and coordinate their networks.

Multinationals already do this for tax purposes and utilizing various loopholes in international treaties. The banking sectors recognizes walled infrastructure to shield foreign scrutiny both in the formal (eg. Swiss banks) or informal (international narco drugs organizations, etc.)

Think of Qatar providing cover for Al Jazeera to bring alternative international voice to global media - small sovereign state will see it to their strategic interests to protect at least part of its sovereignty and a transnational network such as the internet will adapt and make the most of it.

Something like Cryptonomicon or those dudes who were building a jurisdiction neutral on an oil rig but with a more sinister, for profit intent. Like Wikileaks but for profit, totally fair and balanced.

and so on.

Why would a company allow anyone to use their products in a way that is likely to harm the company and cost them more money than the sale brings in?

It depends... do you mean just "free speech" or do you mean "free speech" as in hotly controversial material which makes the hosting provider a lightening-rod for large-scale systematic DDOS attacks, possibly endangering their business and the business of thousands who depend on their services?

Free speech isn't free if there are stipulations. I'm not saying Amazon should have to let you host whatever you want on their servers, just that if you can't host controversial speech there, you can't rightly say you have freedom of speech on that particular service.

Of course. Did anyone ever claim otherwise?

Amazon has always had a whole list of things you can't say or do while using their service. You can't use you AWS site to "promote" child pornography even if it's hosted elsewhere. You can't promote gambling or host pyramid schemes. You can't use it to post anything "obscene."

Wikileaks was kicked off Amazon for breaking their Terms of Service: http://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/

Follow Amazon's rules, and you can use their service. Not sure what's so hard to understand here.

The problem is that the rules are broad enough that many sites could be construed to be breaking them leaving you up to Amazon's whimsy in enforcing them.

I think Amazon has made a pragmatic decision here. There are certainly all kinds of wild things on Amazon's servers and I bet they tolerate quite a lot of deviation from their terms of service.

What happened with wikileaks, however, is a extraordinarily high profile controversy. It was material of very questionable legality, and material whose presence has lead to very serious cyber attacks. It is not reasonable to expect any 3rd party host like amazon to defend this "type" of free speech to the point of exposing themselves to huge risks.

a) Works produced by the U.S. federal government, with the sole exception of protected trademarks, are legally in the public domain. Amazon's wording is unfortunately murky — it does say "own or otherwise control", which can never apply to works in the public domain, so am I in violation of AWS ToS for hosting any single file that I do not have full control over? Items in the public domain, for example, or rights-managed content? If I've purchased a license to publish rights-managed content for one single usage, I in no way "own or otherwise control" the content. Where do I stand there?

b) Amazon further claimed that because Wikileaks released 250,000 documents, that demonstrated that there was no care taken in releasing them and thus they could cause harm to someone, somewhere. The only problem with this is that it is a complete and utter falsity. At the time, Wikileaks had released less than 1,000 documents (and at the end of the releases, less than 1,500 to my knowledge). Every single document released had been pre-cleared and redacted by five well-respected international newspapers they partnered with.

> Works produced by the U.S. federal government, with the sole exception of protected trademarks, are legally in the public domain.

Is this really true? Does anyone have a source for this? Wouldn't this imply that it is illegal for the U.S. federal government to hold any information confidential?

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

I don't know of a statute that makes it illegal to attempt to restrict access to works legally in the public domain, so no, I don't think that implication follows. Once a classified work is public, however, the government cannot assert copyright. They must use clauses in laws such as the Espionage Act to attack the release, and the Supreme Court has not looked kindly upon those attemptsº.

ºhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_St...

Has anyone bothered to ask the question of "public domain for who?". I would assume that works created by the US taxpayers (via the government) would be public domain for US citizens, but is there a clear cut definition of them being public domain for non-US citizens? I can think of several restrictions on such things (such as crypto), that prove otherwise.

If that's the case, does Wikileaks count as a US citizen? I'll admit, I'm completely unfamiliar with the makeup of the organization outside of Julian Assange (who is not a US citizen). If Wikileaks couldn't count as a US citizen, how would they be considered as "owning the data" if the above points are true?

I ask this not to be contrary or confrontational, but simply because I'm curious. This occurred to me awhile back but I haven't seen this position represented since.

It seems you are correct, the public domain status only applies inside the US.

http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html#317

Their arguments in that statement are: 1) copyright infringement, 2) putting innocent people in danger.

The first point is debatable, does that mean the NY Times is unable to use their service? As an ISP will they roll over at the first cease-and-desist order from some copyright lawyer? (Of course they will.)

Point two is absolute conjecture. Amazon is in no position to know who is being put in danger by these documents, let alone what innocent person is in danger by not releasing them. Furthermore, WikiLeaks has already addressed these criticisms, they are already redacting such information and the government has not pointed to a single case where some one has been harmed because of a release.

It's their servers, they can do with them what they want. But let's not pretend they are a viable solution for any company that has any potential for legal conflict. And in this day and age, that's every company.

"But let's not pretend they are a viable solution for any company that has any potential for legal conflict."

And why should they be? Amazon isn't your lawyer and you shouldn't expect them to defend you against legal threats. Just figuring out whether the threat is credible or not would likely cost Amazon more than they'd ever make in profit for hosting your site.

I agree, they're not my lawyer, they're my hosting company. If there's a legal conflict then it should use the court system that has been established to handle such disputes.

If Amazon is a de facto agent of the complainant then to answer the original article's question: Can we use them to host free speech? Then I think the answer is no. Which begs the question, if Amazon can't be used to host free speech, what other kind of speech is worth hosting?

The DMCA was put in place to deal with the copyright issue, so Amazon was covered. No one could hold them liable for copyright infringement.

The putting innocent people in danger argument, if they really made that argument, is a ridiculous standard. Almost anything can put innocent people in danger.

It is impossible to follow those rules if you have any form of user-submitted content. Even if you have a TOS that gives you some rights to their content, you can't guarantee a user doesn't post something of someone else's.

Amazon's TOS is basically a private partial nullification of the DMCA and says that rather than having to take something copyrighted down once notified, you have to ensure it never gets put up there in the first place.

That is something you can't do, even if you manually screen everything before it is allowed to be posted (because there is no universal way to search for whether or not something is under copyright).

I would try nearlyfreespeech.net. They may cave too, but they allow anything to be hosted provided it is not illegal. They have a page describing takedowns.

If you have to ask the question, then the answer is 'no'.

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