Amazon Bans WikiLeaks From Its Servers

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has been kicked off Amazon.com’s U.S. servers after moving its operations just a day ago.


The move by Amazon comes after questioning from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the House Security Committee.
“This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website,” Senator Lieberman said in a statement.
“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.”
WikiLeaks has been the center of attention this week due to its release of more than 250,000 sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. As a result, the U.S. government has been stepping up pressure against the website, which has also been the target of of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Yesterday, in an attempt to thwart the DDoS attacks, WikiLeaks moved its operations from its Swedish servers to Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing and hosting platform. That didn’t even last for a day though; the whistleblower website is once again hosted on its Swedish servers.
Amazon isn’t saying why it kicked WikiLeaks to the curb. While it could have been to protect its servers from inevitable DDoS attacks, we suspect pressure from the U.S. government probably had something to do with it.
That’s not the only problem plaguing it, either. Yesterday, founder Julian Assange was placed on Interpol’s wanted list for sex crimes he’s accused of committing in Sweden.