
Amazon Bows To US Censorship Pressure: Refuses To Host Wikileaks - abrudtkuhl
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101201/12255912081/amazon-bows-to-us-censorship-pressure-refuses-to-host-wikileaks.shtml
======
RiderOfGiraffes
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

~~~
bobds
If this is _Hacker_ News, why is there no similar-story clustering algorithm
(among other things)?

~~~
dasil003
I'm guessing because pg does it in his spare time. Maybe he should take YC
funding and really kick this thing into high gear.

~~~
bobds
It would take maybe 3 days for someone to come up with an algorithm, implement
it and send it to pg ready-for-use. All he has to do is ask.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Yup, I agree with you entirely. It would be great, and it's absolutely
trivial, anyone could do it. Off you go then, and let us know when it's done.
The HN source is available for download, and while no doubt the one PG runs is
slightly different I have no doubt that whatever you write can easily be
integrated.

It doesn't even need to be automatic. You can just have people say "this" is
the same story as "that" - amalgamate.

Shouldn't even be three days - bet you could do it in one.

~~~
seanalltogether
And yet the concept is rife with potential problems. Which article & title
becomes the default, first submitted or highest ranking? What happens if
articles get combined that shouldn't be combined? Is there an undo? Who
controls that? How simple is merging the discussions?

~~~
bobds
I didn't mean to imply that this is an easy problem to solve. My point is that
there are very smart people on HN willing to figure this out for the rest of
us.

------
joshes
This is completely and utterly preposterous.

If you are a citizen of Connecticut, or, hell, _anywhere_ , please email
Lieberman and tell him that his actions and comments are completely ludicrous
and, in fact, anti-Democratic.

[http://lieberman.senate.gov/index.cfm/contact/email-me-
about...](http://lieberman.senate.gov/index.cfm/contact/email-me-about-an-
issue)

~~~
jrockway
But these leaks might make him look bad, and that hurts the next re-election.

Welcome to Amerika, where anyone who speaks out against you is branded a
terrorist. (I have downmodded this exact comment a number of times, because I
never thought it was really true. But this time, that's exactly what's
happening! There is a well-established legal precedent in the US that you can
publish anything that has been leaked, regardless of how you got that
information. The person who leaked it gets in trouble, not the person who
tells everyone about it. But now... we want to throw away our freedoms and
call wikileaks a "terrorist organization". What the fuck? Terrorists fly
airplanes full of people into buildings full of people. This is a collection
of documents that say China hacked Google. NOT THE SAME AT ALL!)

</rant>

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'll give you nice counter-rant. Downvote if you like, but somebody needs to
put what you said in context, so I'll play American Joe Sixpack for that
purpose.

What did you expect? Did you honestly think you could dump years of State
Department cables on the internet and what? Somebody would come give wikileaks
an award? They'd win the Nobel Peace Prize? (yikes, that still might happen)

This is not wikileaks reporting that the war is going badly, ie making a point
that we are being lied to by showing the lies. This isn't honorable. If you'll
remember, when the Pentagon Papers happened the leaker was fully willing to
take whatever punishment came to him. As he should have.

This isn't that, either.

This is some asshole with a computer connection hooking up with somebody else
with a grievance and destroying billions of dollars of my collective property.
His stated mission is to destroy the structure of my country by making it
impossible for various nodes of the country to communicate with each other.

No amount of ranting is going to make an anarchist into a superhero. We need
leaks for society to function, not crazy self-centered promoters bent on
single-handedly redesigning our way of life.

</rant> (wink)

On a more serious note, I told you guys when this happened that there aren't
actions without reactions. If Assange is just getting started? Well the other
side is just getting started too. Expect more of this.

~~~
pavs
Wikileaks is putting the governments of the world naked under the scanner the
same way most of us are being put under the scanner every time you take a
flight.

If we can't have any privacy, the government can't either.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You guys keep hitting me over the head with what's fair or what's right or
going on and on about some moral outrage and how wikileaks is needed.

I keep telling you that none of that matters. Consent of the governed isn't
about the best way of governing people, it's about the general agreement that
things are working this way. Wikileaks has done nothing to change any of that.
So it's just an attack on the government itself. Expect the government to
react. That's all I saying. For every person you _might_ convince that change
is needed, you just created a hundred people wanting to throw the entire
wikileaks bunch in jail.

Honestly, I agree with you that individual freedoms are at an all-time low --
in all kinds of ways. It's a travesty and a horrible thing. I'm just telling
you that the emotional argument about how screwed up things are isn't going to
hold much say when pitted against the way groups of people work. To them, this
is an attack and a crime. Hell, it's an attack and crime to me too, and I
agree with it. (The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive) Yelling about
being surprised at the response here doesn't make much sense to me. You can
easily see where this all is headed, and it's not a new golden age of human
freedom, as much as one is needed.

~~~
rbarooah
Since you agree with the general sentiment (about individual freedoms), but
think that expressing outrage here is futile, can you suggest a response that
is constructive instead?

~~~
mattmanser
Go into politics yourself. There's no better response, it's stand up or shut
up with this kind of issue. Far too complex for most people to understand,
ramifications of great consequence that are hard to vocalise.

Just don't forget what you were getting into power for when you get there.

~~~
rbarooah
Thanks - but I was hoping to hear from DanielBMarkham, basically because his
position seems fatalistic to me but it's also intelligently reasoned, so I was
wondering if I was missing something.

Incidentally - when was the last time politicians changed world for the better
in a major way? (and I don't mean simply voting money to schools or hospitals
- I mean structurally).

~~~
jodrellblank
What do you mean "structurally"? Politician's can't really change things in a
major way apart from voting and signing legisislation, can they? Wouldn't that
take more of a (benevolent) dictator?

<http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/>

~~~
rbarooah
I think that's my point - major reform is almost impossible for politicians to
enact without an external force to react to.

If we have structural problems (e.g. widespread corruption) then politicians
alone won't fix it.

I can't say that I know whether Wikileaks is going to effective, or that it's
going to cause any positive ourcomes, but it seems clear to me that _if_ there
is going to be positive action on corruption it's either going to happen as a
result of a massive crisis (i.e. the system breaks down), or because a new
force shines light on the corruption from outside, forcing politicians to act.
Both paths carry a risk of things getting worse rather than better - although
so does a slow decline resulting from inaction.

Personally, I'd hate to see any (more?) major breakdowns in society, and the
idea of a slow decline is equally tragic. Perhaps wikileaks is doing it wrong,
but the idea of a non-government actor exposing corruption - something the
media has stopped doing - seems entirely healthy to me.

------
sespindola
As an Argentinian who admires the entrepreneurial spirit of the USA, I'm
amazed and appalled at how quickly it is becoming politically intolerant and
borderline fascistic.

I can't help but draw parallels between cablegate and watergate and wonder if,
had watergate occurred nowadays, would there be Senators trying to declare the
Post a "terrorist organization" and wanting Bob Woodward dead.

Assange should zip all the documents and release them on Tor. Although I doubt
the onion routers could whitstand that ammount of traffic.

~~~
Perceval
As an Argentinian, you should be well familiar that your country took in
scores of actual fascists from Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, giving them
safe harbor from war crimes prosecutions. There remain entire towns in
Argentina where German is the primary spoken language, where still-living
Nazis are residing undisturbed.

Calling America "borderline fascistic" because private companies aren't
allowed to harbor illegally obtained diplomatic documents is less an accurate
characterization of the United States than it is a display that you have
little or no understanding of what fascism is. This should be particularly
embarrassing because of your country's historical entanglement with fascists.

You could talk to some of your German-speaking countrymen if you're still
unclear as to why Godwinning this thread is idiotic.

~~~
exit
> _where still-living Nazis and their children are residing undisturbed_

why shouldn't their children reside undisturbed?

~~~
Perceval
Edited so you'll no longer miss the point.

------
fab13n
Cool, they'll have to distribute their content over hard-to-control media
(Tor, P2P etc.), thus helping such technologies becoming widespread.

Throw in a P2P-based DNS sponsored by COICA, and those elder, digitally
illiterate baby-boomer leaders will have done a lot for a freer Internet,
although unwillingly.

~~~
aperiodic
Making wikileaks.org inaccessible by default still has tremendous impact. Not
that many people have the technical proficiency to use Tor, use P2P software,
or even know what the hell DNS, whereas almost anyone knows how to type
"wikileaks.org" into their address bar.

~~~
ladon86
A surprising number of people don't know how to even do that (my mum included,
though I've tried to explain). They can type 'wikileaks' into Google though.

~~~
cjoh
Even fewer people know how to take wikileaks.org data and do anything with it.
Wikileaks, in general, serves intermediaries. Wikileaks.org is useful for
fundraising though...

------
nikcub
Amazon defended the child pedo guide based on free speech rights. They
completely collapsed here to political pressure.

Hypocrites.

~~~
edanm
I'm pretty sure they took that down as well. They initially defended it, but a
few hours later they took it down.

As is their right. They're a private company, they're entitled to do whatever
they want.

~~~
aagha
They're actually a public company. But that doesn't matter unless you hold
enough shares in the company to make them care the way you want to.

~~~
dunmalg
Private as in "not a governmental body subject to the whims of politicians",
not private as in "not traded on the stock exchange".

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Well, they succumbed to political pressure, thus, quite close to if not indeed
at the whims of politicians.

------
awt
This sounds like a job for freenet. <http://freenetproject.org/>

~~~
jrockway
Nah, BitTorrent is fine for this sort of thing. It's much more illegal to
distribute a new movie than it is to distribute a bunch of now-public
government documents.

~~~
awt
Not sure why Freenet is less appropriate than BitTorrent.

~~~
burgerbrain
Has to do with how much data can be effectively pushed across it to a large
number of people.

------
lukev
We wouldn't allow Amazon to host DVD rips. Doesn't classified government
information deserve a bit _more_ protection than mere copyright, not less?

~~~
nostromo
The New York Times posted classified government information a while back --
"Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the
National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the
United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-
approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to
government officials."

Do you think their hosting facility should drop them?

~~~
bediger
You mean this story:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html>

It ran Dec 16, 2005. Apparently, "Late October 2004: Top Administration
officials convince NYT to spike the NSA domestic spying story." from
[http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/timeline-
collection/warran...](http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/timeline-
collection/warrantless-wiretap-memos-timeline/)

The NYT did publish it, but one guesses they did it when the government
agency(s) in question permitted them to. Or after someone else broke the
story, and NYT would look stupid for not covering it.

~~~
brown9-2
"The NYT did publish it, but one guesses they did it when the government
agency(s) in question permitted them to."

No, not at all.

The difference here though is breaking a story of huge interest to every
citizen versus merely making public previously private and confidential
communication between diplomats, indiscriminately.

~~~
adambyrtek
Maybe you are right, but the point is whether Amazon (or any other hosting
company) should act as a judge and decide whether the leak was justified or
not.

~~~
krschultz
No, they're acting as a property owner saying "get this shit off my lawn, we
didn't ask for you to have your fight here".

Once again, the freedom of speech does not give you the right to abuse other
people's freedom to control their own property. Amazon's servers are their
property, why do they have to let their brand image go down in the mind of
people who are anti-Wikileaks?

------
roboneal
Honest question: Based on the general sentiment here, is there anything that a
government should be legitimately allowed to keep secret?

------
rprasad
Amazon didn't bow to political pressure. It made a business decision to
protect its _other_ clients from interruption of services that constant,
government-level DDOS'ing would cause.

~~~
rapind
Government DOSing of Amazon would get a lot of attention... An organized
attack bringing down ec2 / s3 would risk the attention of some pretty clever
individuals who's businesses and hobbies were affected and produce some
interesting fallout.

------
ataggart
It will be interesting to see the overlap between those decrying this
government pressure to infringe upon the free speech rights of an
organization, and those decrying the Supreme Court's ruling in _Citizens
United_ that such organizations are protected by the First Amendment.

------
guelo
Lieberman is an authoritarian scumbag and a traitor, his loyalties lie with
Israel over the U.S.

