WikiLeaks dropped its latest information bomb earlier this week and almost immediately its website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. WikiLeaks responded by moving its content to Amazon’s servers. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is known for being relatively inexpensive, highly scalable, and particularly robust.
Within 24 hours of being contacted by US Senator Joe Lieberman‘s (I-Connecticut) office, Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks’ content, making the content unavailable to American citizens. Lieberman is chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Amazon’s business could be severely impacted by any number of even small “adjustments” by the US government. You can do the math.
But what’s especially alarming is that apparently no one from Lieberman’s office even made an actual takedown request, only asked questions. “Staffers then, according to the spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, called Amazon to ask about it, and left questions with a press secretary including, “Are there plans to take the site down?” according to Rachel Slajda writing for Talking Points Memo.
WikiLeaks promptly responded to the takedown on Twitter: “If Amazon was so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.” Purists will argue this is not a First Amendment issue because only a government can censor expression, and Amazon is a corporation. But a more enlightened view of censorship finds that the suppression of expression by any controlling body—governmental or not; organizational or individual—is a violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. But enlightenment always precedes legal precedent.
As the right wing called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be assassinated or executed as a spy, President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, displaying breathtaking cluelessness, dismissed Assange’s call for the resignation of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by saying, “I’m not entirely sure why we care about the opinion of one guy with one website. Our foreign policy and the interests of this country are far stronger than his one website.”
Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, sums up Lieberman’s action the best: “That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host—and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet—is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time.”
That a US Senator would take whatever action necessary to prevent American citizens from reading the WikiLeaks documents—documents that reveal what the citizenry’s government is up to—is both despicable and indefensible. As Greenwald writes, “But any attempt by political officials to start blocking Americans’ access to political content on the internet ought to provoke serious uproar and unrest.”
Lieberman subsequently strong-armed a data-visualization company, Tableau, to takedown visualizations of the WikiLeaks material. This was data-visualizations folks—the number of cables that originated in each country, for example, or the number of cables per year—this was not the actual cable content.
But Lieberman wasn’t satisfied with coaxing Amazon to takedown WikiLeaks and Tableau to takedown its visualizations. Today he proposed legislation—the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination (SHIELD) Act—making it a federal crime for anyone to publish the name of a US intelligence source. Lieberman’s proposed legislation tacks onto the Section 798 of the Espionage Act that forbids publishing certain classified information. As Kevin Poulson, writing for Wired, notes, “Leaking such information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers.” Lieberman’s co-sponsors of the proposed legislation are Senators John Ensign (R-Nevada) and Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts).
As Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Slajda, “This certainly implicates First Amendment rights to the extent that web hosts may, based on direct or informal pressure, limit the materials the American public has a First Amendment right to access.”
Update: Thursday, 2 December 2010 8:16PM CST: Amazon has denied that Lieberman’s inquiry caused its WikiLeaks takedown. The takedown instead resulted from a WikiLeaks violation of Amazon’s terms of service. This is Amazon lame attempt to walk back its cowardly actions while simultaneously covering Lieberman’s ass.
It’s time for one or more (several would be best) of US-based content distribution networks (CDNs) to step up and volunteer to distribute the WikiLeaks material, gratis. I’m looking at you Level 3; how better to demonstrate your true support for an open internet?
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