WikiLeaks Loses Its Host and Its DNS Provider After 'Encouragements' from US Senator

WikiLeaks has always been controversial, but the latest big move, revealing over 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies, has been met with more resistance than ever. While the US government hasn't made any actual accusations, pressure from grandstanding politicians is making companies even remotely associated with WikiLeaks drop it faster than you can say "free speech."

First Amazon dropped WikiLeaks' hosting account on Web Services. The company has now commented on the move saying that it wasn't pressure from people like US Senator Joe Lieberman that prompted it to act but rather the fact that WikiLeaks breached its Terms of Service.

"There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate," a blog post from Amazon reads.

"There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate," it continues.

"Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating," it explains.

Amazon says that the fact that WikiLeaks didn't own the rights to the material it was sharing is a violation of its Terms. Secondly, it argued that the data would have very likely put people's life in danger since it couldn't have been redacted perfectly.

While the latter argument is debatable, the first seems very weak. There is no copyright on government documents, under US law. This means that, strictly from this point of view, they can be published by anyone.

What's even more interesting is that, under the US Espionage Act, publishing leaked information is not illegal. Leaking it in the first place is, but publishing it isn't. Of course, that's about to change if Lieberman gets his way.

While Amazon was the first it was hardly the only company to try to get as far from Wikileaks as possible. Tableau Software removed a visualization of the WikiLeaks data, things like where do most cables originate from, how they ranked based on subject and so on.

It's important to note that the visualization only relied on aggregate data and didn't include any actual content from the cables. What's more, the visualizations are widely available elsewhere online.

But the biggest damage to WikiLeaks was done by EveryDNS.net, the site's DNS provider. The company decided to drop WikiLeaks as a user claiming that the constant DDoS attacks were a threat to the other 500,000 websites it serves.

At the time of writing, wikileaks.org is inaccessible. However, the organization has set up a provisional alternative over at wikileaks.ch though this leads to an IP address, 213.251.145.96. Regardless, the site is up and running at that address.

All of this comes from comments by Lieberman and not requests or pressure from official bodies or agencies, at least not public ones.

What this basically means is that all of these companies effectively aided in censoring WikiLeaks without any legal obligation to do so. Sure, EveryDNS.net cites technical reasons, not political ones, but it's hard not to see at least some connection.

But if companies are so easy to push around, just by issuing some public statements, what will happen when there will be laws against publishing leaked content, like the one Lieberman is now trying to pass.

Yesterday, he introduced legislation that would make it illegal in the US to publish the names of CIA sources. If it were to pass, it would mean that any newspaper, website or company associated with publishing such data could be held responsible.

It pretty hard to argue that this does not go against the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the one that the country has been passing around for a couple of centuries as the gold standard in free speech and equal rights.

And yet, few are taking WikiLeaks' side, if not because they believe in the way the site operates simply because of what the US government is willing to do to shut it down.

Update: The author would like to issue an apology for the regretable oversight leading to easyDNS being incorrectly mentioned as DNS provider for WikiLeaks. Thanks to all that have pointed out the initially incorrect info, especially Evan.