Amazon creates ‘dangerous precedent’: cease hosting WikiLeaks

As a result of an inquiry sent by the US senate Homeland Security Committee over the release of classified U.S. government documents on the WikiLeaks website Amazon.com Inc has stopped hosting Julian Assange’s web resource.

It is known that after hackers tried to flood the website in order to prevent users from accessing classified information WikiLeaks turned to Amazon to keep the site available. Now WikiLeaks says it is being hosted by other servers in Europe.

Staff for Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman had questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks Tuesday and called on other companies that provide web-hosting services to boycott WikiLeaks.

"I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on WikiLeaks' previous publication of classified material," Lieberman, an independent, said in a statement. "I call on any other company or organization that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."

Even though Amazon has stopped providing the web-hosting services to WikiLeaks, Lieberman suggested that his problem with the company was not fully resolved.

"I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information," Lieberman said.

Ryan Calo, a lecturer at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, said that under U.S. law, Amazon would likely have been shielded from any possible prosecution by the government over the WikiLeaks document dump.

"It would set a dangerous precedent were companies like Amazon to take down things merely because the senator or another government entity started to ask question about them," Calo said.