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Amazon denies government pressure over Wikileaks
ONLINE BOOK SELLER Amazon has denied that it told the whistleblowing website Wikileaks to get out of its cloud because of government pressure.
Wikileaks retreated to the Amazon cloud after it was subjected to a denial of service attack. Amazon's servers were able to deal with the attack, but in the end it decided that Wikileaks had to leave.
In a statement, Amazon said that Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. While AWS does not pre-screen its customers, it does have terms of service that must be followed.
Amazon said that by distributing documents that it could not prove it had legally under copyright law, Wikileaks was violating its service agreement.
The outfit's terms of service state, "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content... [and] that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity."
Amazon pointed out that it is clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content.
The company was also a little worried that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing had been carefully redacted to ensure that it wasn't putting innocent people in jeopardy.
However Amazon denied that it was trying to censor anything because it was too controversial. It said that some of the data on its cloud is controversial, and that's perfectly fine.
"But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere," an Amazon spokesperson said. µ
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I was looking at fridge freezers and Argos was cheapest, followed by Comet/Currys, and then Amazon. I was surprised that Amazon was the most expensive. And sometimes it was by a high margin.
Amazon isn't as good value as it once was.
Amazon denies government pressure ??
And just where does everyone suppose the Denial of Service Attack originated from in the first place???
"$736M profit on 75B revenue. 1% profit is just kind of just scraping by."
It may only be scraping by, but it will kill the competition, they they will be one of the few left and they can charge what they want. That's what happened when the dot com bubble burst. My business died as all these other places were doing lead loss - for over a year- just to kill the competition. Thanks newegg. It sounds like Amazon is following that model.
Amazon bowed to political pressure of Lieberman, a rabid war-monger who has more blood on his hands than anyone exposing the truth possibly could ever.
Amazon removing the files is shameful, but to be expected. Corporations have *zero* interest in freedom or keeping a check on the gov't; their motive is sheerly money and it's actually easier to operate under fascism, with competition suppressed.
@BB: since when has exposing The Truth been legally dubious?
There's nothing at all dubious about US gov't ILLEGALLY invaded and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, YET you completely ignore actual murders of a million people while wringing your hands over publishing a few documents? -- You're more of a danger to freedom than Osama Bin Laden.
By the way, according to figures I read, Amazon isn't a great success: $736M profit on 75B revenue. 1% profit is just kind of just scraping by.
I doubt Amazon even knew they were being hosted on their cloud until some hooplah was made about the site being hosted on Amazon's hardware.
I think Amazon thought through the issue quite clearly and opted to remove themselves from liability. Amazon has nothing to gain by being a "champion" for legally dubious/ambiguous material dissemination.
Um, and they only noticed that _after_ having accepted to host it ?
Sounds like a flimsy excuse to me.
On the other hand, it's par for the course of management these days : never think anything through, react only after it's too late and don't bother to make any forecasts or plans beyond where the next gig is and how to get there.