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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."

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. You mean there's only one cloud? by countertrolling · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And Amazon is it? Why aren't we all making our own little clouds? Oh yeah, the ISPs are trying to stamp that out. I guess there can only be one.

    --
    For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
  2. Re:Amazon Response by dominion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    U.S. federal government documents are not covered under copyright, so when you're talking about "ownership", there's no legal basis for this argument. Those documents, now leaked, are in the public domain. Wikileaks "owns" them just as much as anyone else.

    Also, this part:

    Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

    Is a really dangerous precedent for Amazon to set for themselves. If you're going to cancel members accounts based on not just the potential danger of known information held within, but on the possibility that information not yet discovered could potentially put someone in danger, that's making a decision based on an extraordinary amount of hypotheticals.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Re:Amazon Response by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Especially as the statement you quote is an outright lie by Amazon. While this "fact" is a standard pro-Government talking point, it simply is utterly untrue that Wikileaks is releasing 250,000 leaked cables. They are, indeed, only releasing those that have gone through a review process (and they're involving a small group of selected, highly respected, journalists, who are familiar with the redacting process, to do this review.)

    The fact Amazon.com needs to resort to a bald-faced lie to distance itself from the allegations of government pressure says a great deal about the truth here.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.