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Amazon Cloud Not Big Enough For Feds and WikiLeaks

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-out-of-town dept.

theodp writes "Dave Winer was already upset that Amazon Web Services (AWS) pulled the plug on WikiLeaks for posting classified US government documents. So, he wasn't exactly thrilled to receive email three weeks later from an AWS PR flack boasting that 'the US federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments.' Writes Winer: 'It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon's web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.' Amazon, which wowed the White House with its ability to scale video slideshow site Animoto, was able to get its foot in the Federal door as a Recovery.gov redesign subcontractor."

2 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Should anybody really be supprised... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I haven't seen the corruption they think exists.

    You are blind. Here is a short list of things you should be able to see, but cannot.

    • United States trained Iraqi torture brigade (google: iraqi wolf brigade)
    • Swedish judicial system is a puppet that accepts instruction from United States (google: pirate bay us cables)
    • United States diplomats tasked with collecting DNA samples (among other things) from their foreign counter-parts (google: us cables dna)
    • United States partaking in secret military action and lying to American and Yemenese citizens about it (google: us cables yemen)
    • Everything else I've forgotten about (this is an extemporaneously generated list, afterall)
    • Everything that hasn't yet been released (the vast majority of the leaked cables)

    If you have trouble with the google (most blind people do), let me know and I'll spend a bunch of my time collecting links, analyzing them, distilling information, and chewing your food for you.

  2. Re:Amazon Response by dominion · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, but it is perfectly fine precedent for WikiLeaks to judge that they aren't putting anyone at risk.

    Less than 1% of the cables have been released. Wikileaks is working with around a dozen news services from around the world to sift through the data. Wikileaks gave The Pentagon the option to redact sensitive information, and they refused.

    There has not been a full dump of the 250,000 cables, they have been slowly releasing them alongside the news agencies they're working with (New York Times, The Guardian, etc). What we've seen so far is only a small fraction of the cables.

    The idea that Wikileaks has been indiscriminate with releasing the cables is simply not true.