WikiLeaks has been the center of controversy this week due to having released more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables onto the internet and into the hands of select news organizations. Many of the cables are sensitive in nature and describe U.S. relations and efforts with countries such as Russia, South Korea and Pakistan.
As can be imagined, the U.S. government is not too happy about the release of these confidential documents and has been putting a lot of pressure against the website. This news comes after U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the House Security Committee, questioned Amazon.com.
“I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material,” notes Lieberman.
Since the release of these cables, WikiLeaks has been under the target of of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, leaving the site crippled. It moved from its Swedish servers to Amazon Web Services yesterday. The site promptly received more DDoS attacks, and have been booted off Amazon and are not back on its Swedish servers.
It seems likely that Amazon dropped WikiLeaks because of pressure from the U.S. government, though no official reason has been given.
