Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131730912/wikileaks-leaves-amazon-host-servers

by credo • 16 years ago

107 51 16 years ago

npr.org

ilconsigliere• 16 years ago

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...

vaksel• 16 years ago

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.

tptacek4• 16 years ago

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.

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Choose your news source:

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

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959655 - cnn.com

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

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

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959335 - npr.org

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

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959308 - readwriteweb.com

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

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959257 - techcrunch.com

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

darrenkopp• 16 years ago

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.

phillian• 16 years ago

Agreed 100%.

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

kylec• 16 years ago

I find Joe Lieberman reprehensible

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

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

chopsueyar2• 16 years ago

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

felixmar• 16 years ago

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.

benatkin2• 16 years ago

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. :(

cagenut• 16 years ago

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

celoyd• 16 years ago

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.

fleitz3• 16 years ago

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

drawkbox• 16 years ago

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.

nodata• 16 years ago

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

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

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.

michaelchisari3• 16 years ago

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

megablast• 16 years ago

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.

benatkin2• 16 years ago

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.

fleitz3• 16 years ago

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.

defroost• 16 years ago

> 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.

OpieCunningham• 16 years ago

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.

danhak• 16 years ago

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.

dtf• 16 years ago

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

:-)

tybris• 16 years ago

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")

marcamillion2• 16 years ago

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 :)

QE2• 16 years ago

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

marcamillion2• 16 years ago

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.

SageRaven• 16 years ago

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?

AndyKelley• 16 years ago

http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html

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

rwhitman• 16 years ago

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?

siglesias• 16 years ago

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.

c2• 16 years ago

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.

Amazon no longer hosts wikileaks

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