Dec 2, 2010 16:00 GMT  ·  By

Amazon has booted Wikileaks from its cloud platform, barely a day after the whistleblower site moved to the hosting platform to avoid the constant barrage of distributed denial of service attacks.

Amazon hasn't commented on the move, but some US officials commended the company for its pro-active solution to censoring Wikileaks, though they expressed concern that Amazon allowed this to happen in the first place. The whistleblower is now relying on its regular Swedish host and the site is widely available.

"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free--fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe," a tweet on Wikileaks' official Twitter account reads.

"If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books," another adds.

Wikileaks hasn't been lacking for public spotlight for the past year, but its latest big move, the release of close to 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies from around the world propelled the site to a new level of notoriety.

Unfortunately, it also propelled it to a new level of attacks from authorities and vigilantes alike.

Amazon has not commented on the situation. However, the move came after pressure from American officials, though it's unclear if any authorities were involved.

So far, there have been no charges filed against the site or its public figure, Julian Assange, so the illegality of their activities and the material is questionable. Still, rumors say that the Justice Department is frantically searching for something to base an official accusation on.

That's not stopping elected officials from going after the organization. Notably, Senator Joe Lieberman is taking credit for Amazon's actions.

"WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world,” Lieberman said in a statement.

“No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials," he added.

It's not enough that Amazon acted now and booted Wikileaks, Lieberman believes it should have happened before the site even published the documents.

"This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks' previous publication of classified material," he said.

He does seem to be confused though, both about how Amazon's Web Services platform works, understandable since cloud platforms can be hard to understand even for tech-savvy folks, but also about how Wikileaks works as well.

"I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information," Lieberman said.

Of course, Amazon has no relation whatsoever with Wikileaks. It does operate the Web Services platform, a self-service product which enables anyone to set up a hosting account.

However, Amazon does not have to approve new accounts creation or screen the content being hosted. The company, however, cited unnamed violations of its policy in kicking off Wikileaks.

In the end, the fact that Amazon chose this path does little for the availability of the leaked documents. Neither do the DDoS attacks, regardless if they are from 'patriots' or shadowy organizations, since all of the documents are already shared on peer-to-peer networks, via technologies such as BitTorrent, impervious to even the most determined attacks.