The classified documents being hosted on AWS were in fact illegal to do so, and thus against the AUP of AWS so it was perfectly reasonable and appropriate to pull the plug.
The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.
If you get bombed/terrorised that's policy changing, nation wide traumatic event and a good reason to bomb the shit out of the one attacked you. If you do the same thing to another country (read plethora of countries) then you first tag the journalist who has the balls to expose you, denounce him as a criminal and then call it incomparable to your little presidential problems.
I don't care much about many traits you have just displayed arrogance, ignorance and indifference being the leading ones but such ugly patriotism is perhaps the worst of all and is the leading cause of where we are now as a world.
I know this is the kind of comment that will get downvoted and considering the general climate of HN it should be downvoted but some people really deserve such harsh comments because their claims written in nice and harmless language is plain offensive to all the people US decided to fuck up in their history (and that's lots and lots of people all around the world).
For example, from the Manning leaks we learned that the U.S. railed against a proposed increase in the minimum wage in Hati. It would have raised wages from 24¢ to 61¢ an hour. American corporations that take advantage of Hati for cheap labor couldn't have that. I'm looking at you Hanes and Levi Strauss.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/06/us-haiti-wik...
Try interpunction, you'll get significantly fewer downvotes.
The comment I made states it is illegal to host classified material if you aren't authorized to do so. That's it.
http://www.salon.com/2010/11/29/wikileaks_yemen_revelations/
Yes, it was perfectly legal for him to pull Wikileaks. However, that fact that he pulled Wikileaks when he didn't have to (there was no court order or anything like it), showed that he isn't the big defender of free press that he claims to be.
If they were illegal, then what law was broken in hosting them?
Remember, newspapers are in the business of getting information sent to them by people who broke rules in doing so, and then hosting/publishing/otherwise distributing said information to the public. Despite the fact that there are powerful people who do not want that to happen. And said powerful people are quick to claim that the law is on their side, whether or not it is.
Examples include Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, Snowden's revelations, and (of course) Wikileaks. In every case newspapers were threatened.
The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.
So exposing one crime is OK, but exposing 1000 is not?
With EVERY case there are people telling us that this case is different, and not like famous cases of the past. They are wrong. We have amnesia about how similar they, in fact, are.
Take Watergate since you brought it up. The burglars were arrested June 17, 1972. Bob Woodward reported that they had connections to Howard Hunt on June 20, 1972. This began a continuous series of reporting that the country as a whole did not care about. Were you alive back then, I would be willing to bet that, like the majority that re-elected Nixon in a landslide on November 7, 1972, you would have thought that this was not an important story, and would have objected to the witchhunt.
Public opinion did not begin its slide until January, 1973. (http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/wait-about-two-month... has a graph showing the shifts in approval.)
It is illegal to disseminate, store, transmit, etc, classified material if you aren't allowed to do so. That is the crime, and it also against the AUP and is laid out right near the beginning of the document here: http://aws.amazon.com/aup/
Really? Which law? Can you point to examples of judges agreeing with this theory?
Why did nobody come down on various newspapers for transmitting the clearly classified information that they got from Snowden?
> Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people and mishandling can incur criminal penalties.
I'm sure someone could have tried to throw the hammer down about the Snowden leak, but they probably realized they would look ridiculous doing that over a few Powerpoint slides vs. thousands of diplomatic cables and other information which were released by Manning. Also note: Snowden is releasing specific information related to a specific crime. I keep repeating this because it is highly relevant to whistleblower protections && reporter shields etc.
There are plenty of legitimate AWS competitors.
99% of the software (which is all that really matters) running on those instances is open source.
It's not like you have to use the PEM they generate. In fact, you could pay them to store a whole virtual machine of zeroes. They don't care.
He lost me at the AWS conspiracies. Being the world's largest online retailer, and especially the largest retailer of books, is a much bigger deal.