These days the eyes of the world are focused on WikiLeaks, the organization that released the text of diplomatic cables between the US State Department and embassies around the globe. The leaking of thousands of classified documents caused immediate controversy and shook the US Government that stood and witnessed the opening of Pandora’s Box. Although these actions cannot be undone, prevention of the further publication of the documents and unquestionable sabotage of WikiLeaks website is in full swing.
In case you have been cut of from the world and missed countless news reports that followed the website day in and day out, here is a short summary of what was going on this past week. WikiLeaks released sensitive diplomatic documents on Sunday. Upon publishing the classified documents, WikiLeaks website suffered continuous distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Number of headlines suggested that this was the Government’s doing.
To deal with the attacks, WikiLeaks moved their website hosting to the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but this didn’t last for more than one day. On Wednesday, WikiLeaks was cut off from Amazon service. The sudden decision of the cloud hosting provider to remove WikiLeaks site from its servers made it obvious that Amazon has fallen to the pressure of government and numerous critics that were eager to antagonize the website.
According to several news articles, Senator Joseph Lieberman asked of Amazon to stop servicing WikiLeaks. In his statement, senator said that Amazon notified his staff Wednesday morning that they are no longer providing hosting services to WikiLeaks. He then added that he wished Amazon acted earlier as the release of classified documents was illegal, posing threat to national security and putting lives at risk across the world. He concluded the statement saying that “No responsible company—whether American or foreign—should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”
The site was down for few hours before it was moved back to the previous host in Sweeden, Bahnhof AB. The same day the organization voiced their dissatisfaction tweeting a message saying “WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.“
The next day Amazon explained why it stopped hosting WikiLeaks, saying it had nothing to do with the pressure coming from the government, but with the WikiLeaks breach of the hosting provider’s terms of service. According to Amazon, the violation occurred because WikiLeaks did not control all of the rights related to the diplomatic cables it released.
Amazon’s decision does have a legal backing, but does it also imply that they would easily boot any other customer whose content would not get the approval of certain government members? Why should any company risk using their services if Amazon can so easily break under pressure of critics. The decision Amazon made with WikiLeaks may lead to companies losing trust in public cloud services. This raises the need for a discussion around responsibilities of cloud providers towards customers who host political or in other way controversial content.
Other US companies followed the footsteps of Amazon denying further service to WikiLeaks. Seattle-based software company Tableau Software barred the document leaking website from using their software used for creating and sharing interactive graphics and charts. On Thursday, Tableau came out with an explanation of their action which caused quite a stir among users who, rightfully so, saw this as an act of censorship.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks lost the domain name that was provided by the US Company EveryDNS.net. Quickly enough, the website showed up again using a new Swiss domain name. The company published a statement saying they sent WikiLeaks 24-hour termination notification email and how any downtime of the website was due to its failure to find another DNS solution.
Next to deny service to WikiLeaks was the online payment service PayPal that announced on Friday they decided to block financial transfers to WikiLeaks. The statement on PayPal site said: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”.
The company denied that their decision was influenced by the US government. This may be hard to believe considering the events surrounding Wikileaks and a number of US companies that did their part in disableing the websites operation during the past week. Given that PayPal was one of the channels WikiLeaks used to take donations, suspension of its Paypal account will add more difficulties for WikiLeaks to keep their online operations going.
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PayPal and Amazon Bow to Government Pressure and Blocked WikiLeaks
In case you have been cut of from the world and missed countless news reports that followed the website day in and day out, here is a short summary of what was going on this past week. WikiLeaks released sensitive diplomatic documents on Sunday. Upon publishing the classified documents, WikiLeaks website suffered continuous distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Number of headlines suggested that this was the Government’s doing.
To deal with the attacks, WikiLeaks moved their website hosting to the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but this didn’t last for more than one day. On Wednesday, WikiLeaks was cut off from Amazon service. The sudden decision of the cloud hosting provider to remove WikiLeaks site from its servers made it obvious that Amazon has fallen to the pressure of government and numerous critics that were eager to antagonize the website.
According to several news articles, Senator Joseph Lieberman asked of Amazon to stop servicing WikiLeaks. In his statement, senator said that Amazon notified his staff Wednesday morning that they are no longer providing hosting services to WikiLeaks. He then added that he wished Amazon acted earlier as the release of classified documents was illegal, posing threat to national security and putting lives at risk across the world. He concluded the statement saying that “No responsible company—whether American or foreign—should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”
The site was down for few hours before it was moved back to the previous host in Sweeden, Bahnhof AB. The same day the organization voiced their dissatisfaction tweeting a message saying “WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.“
The next day Amazon explained why it stopped hosting WikiLeaks, saying it had nothing to do with the pressure coming from the government, but with the WikiLeaks breach of the hosting provider’s terms of service. According to Amazon, the violation occurred because WikiLeaks did not control all of the rights related to the diplomatic cables it released.
Amazon’s decision does have a legal backing, but does it also imply that they would easily boot any other customer whose content would not get the approval of certain government members? Why should any company risk using their services if Amazon can so easily break under pressure of critics. The decision Amazon made with WikiLeaks may lead to companies losing trust in public cloud services. This raises the need for a discussion around responsibilities of cloud providers towards customers who host political or in other way controversial content.
Other US companies followed the footsteps of Amazon denying further service to WikiLeaks. Seattle-based software company Tableau Software barred the document leaking website from using their software used for creating and sharing interactive graphics and charts. On Thursday, Tableau came out with an explanation of their action which caused quite a stir among users who, rightfully so, saw this as an act of censorship.
On Thursday, WikiLeaks lost the domain name that was provided by the US Company EveryDNS.net. Quickly enough, the website showed up again using a new Swiss domain name. The company published a statement saying they sent WikiLeaks 24-hour termination notification email and how any downtime of the website was due to its failure to find another DNS solution.
Next to deny service to WikiLeaks was the online payment service PayPal that announced on Friday they decided to block financial transfers to WikiLeaks. The statement on PayPal site said: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”.
The company denied that their decision was influenced by the US government. This may be hard to believe considering the events surrounding Wikileaks and a number of US companies that did their part in disableing the websites operation during the past week. Given that PayPal was one of the channels WikiLeaks used to take donations, suspension of its Paypal account will add more difficulties for WikiLeaks to keep their online operations going.