Is Amazon Afraid of WikiLeaks Legal Liability?

By Charley Moore | December 1, 2010
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Earlier today Amazon shut down the main WikiLeaks site devoted to the leaked diplomatic cables, making it unavailable in the U.S. and Europe (though it now appears the site is back up). Of course, the sites have been mirrored all over the world, so the data is still out there, as are innumerable news stories on the cables.

How did Amazon, best known for online retail, become involved in “cablegate”? The e-commmerce giant doesn’t have specific ties to WikiLeaks or its founder Julian Assange, but through Amazon.com Inc., it did provide the server space to host the site. Availability of cablegate.wikileaks.org has been spotty since Sunday, when, as The Guardian reports, the Sweden-based Bahnhof servers “started to come under a series of internet-based attacks by unknown hackers. WikiLeaks dealt with the attacks in part by moving to servers run by Amazon Web Services, which is self-service.” In the meantime, WikiLeaks has gone back to using the Swedish provider to host the cable-related pages. It’s unclear whether WikiLeaks left Amazon of its own accord, was asked to leave, or was forcibly shut down.

Though Amazon hasn’t been very forthcoming with their reasons for pulling the site, their actions probably come as a response to calls made by Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, for U.S. companies to boycott WikiLeaks. Some politicians like Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) are calling for WikiLeaks to be listed as a terrorist organization, while others are dismissive of the site. “I’m not entirely sure why we care about the opinion of one guy with one website,” said Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary. “Our foreign policy and the interests of this country are far stronger than his one website.”

So did the government get Amazon to shut down the WikiLeaks site, or was it the corporation’s independent decision? The pentagon has not been willing to launch any cyberattacks against the site directly, saying that the embarrassing nature of the leaked cables isn’t a compelling enough reason, so they probably did not take similar offensive actions against Amazon. As Read Write Cloud reports, “a DOS attack on Wikileaks could affect other sites hosted on the same servers, so it’s possible Amazon.com dropped Wikileaks [to protect other sites].” This would seem to indicate that Amazon wants to avoid any liability with regards to customer sites damaged by any attacks on WikiLeaks. Then again, since the WikiLeaks has “drawn the ire of the United States government, and congressional Republicans are calling on Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange to be be prosecuted for espionage, it’s possible that Amazon.com dropped the site out of concern for its [WikiLeaks’] content.”

In our previous post we covered some of the basic legal issues related to retaliation against WikiLeaks, founder and Australian national Julian Assange, and Pcf. Bradley Manning who is suspected of having stolen the cables. For more legal perspective, you may be interested in reading The Guardian’s take on it, as well as The New York Times, NPR, and legal blogs like Above the Law.

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  • http://openpolitics.ca Jordan Richards

    Amazon operates worldwide under legal regimes that have a lot of strange theories of liability. Some of them are quite amazing and getting more amazing. UK and Canadian law are two of the very worst.

    Consider the strange and sad case of Wayne Crookes and his gang of Crookes, a group of Canadian political, business and legal interests who have pushed their claim that every single hyperlink to every word they say is libellous (under extremely plaintiff-friendly Canadian law) is itself libellous, republishing the original as if it was wholly included. That seems ridiculous to net users but it has been appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada which agreed to hear it. See http://www.p2pnet.net/story/46419

    What would amaze Americans is that Crookes is suing over criticism not of his company or person but of his activities as the top management and financial officer of a political party, the Green Party of Canada, that happened to owe him a few hundred grand at the time. A pretty bald conflict of interest. Any comment on this in the US would be totally exempt from lawsuits because it’s a political matter. Not so in Canada!

    Wayne Crookes’ most bizarre claim and the one most directly relevant to Julian Assange’s case is that everyone who posts or allows someone else to post a link to a web site has republished all of that site.
    While they lost at the appeals level http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090918/0118426233.shtml there are dozens of other lawsuits unresolved. Crookes and his gang sued Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, PBwiki and openpolitics.ca (wiki operators) and even (shades of the Assange matter) DNS providers.

    A finding of civil liability even in an obscure and strange jurisdiction like British Columbia can still be enforced by clever lawyers on defendants in California, Florida or the UK. Global companies can’t keep their business interests clear of such claims which are in many ways far more insidious than criminal claims.

    So yes what the State Department is trying to do criminally to Julian Assange could be followed up with a pile of US-friendly businessmen and lawyers (easy to find) suing in obscure jurisdictions (so-called “libel tourism” or “forum shopping”) about the invented impact of any one of those 250,000 cables. And suing every search engine, blog and lawyer who ever posted a single link even to the collection (in Crookes’ case against Jon Newton / P2Pnet, the link was to http://openpolitics.ca itself not the pages Crookes objected to).

    Yahoo got its case dismissed but Google and Wikipedia are still stuck in this legal quagmire created by bad law in Canada. So Amazon is probably wise to fear a thousand little Crookes suing it for hosting a controversial content base, because those lawsuits could come from anywhere the data can be read – including BC. Political comment or content, it’s worth noting, has *NO* exemption in Canada or UK law. It can be sued over like anything else, and requires only a balance of probabilities to be proven.

    Julian Assange versus Wayne Crookes – who will prevail in their view of the Internet? All of us liable for everything we so much as link to (Crookes) and subject to civil lawsuit and legal fees at any time? Or everything readable by everyone, period, with only the initial “leaker” bearing only criminal liability?