Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks shutdown calls spark censorship row

France joins calls for WikiLeaks to be taken offline as liberal activists raise comparisons with China's Google censorship

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Ewen MacAskill and Josh Halliday
guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 December 2010 19.30 GMT
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WikiLeaks went offline for the third time in a week. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The US opened new fronts in its fight against WikiLeaks today as civil rights groups accused the authorities of censorship.

The whistleblower's website went offline for the third time in a week this morning – the biggest threat to its online presence so far. The site re-emerged later on a Swiss domain.

France joined international calls for WikiLeaks to be closed down, warning that it was "unacceptable" for a "criminal" site to be hosted in the country.

The moves came only days after Amazon pulled the WikiLeaks site from its servers after political pressure from Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate homeland security committee.

Lieberman is not finished with Amazon, and is planning to write to the organisation within the next 24 hours asking for details of its relationship with WikiLeaks. The issue is fast turning into a row over freedom of speech, as Democratic and Republican politicians joined calls for action against WikiLeaks, including emergency legislation for legal challenge.

Liberal activists saw echoes of the row involving China and Google earlier this year, censorship the Obama administration decried at the time.

The US civil rights group Human Rights First wrote to Amazon saying that its decision to cease hosting WikiLeaks raised serious concerns and asked the book group to consider this before responding to Lieberman's request for more information.

Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann, of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which campaigns for internet freedom, writing on the organisation's site, said it was "unfortunate that Amazon caved in to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer's right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs".

There have been calls on blogsites for a boycott of Amazon.

Leslie Phillips, communications director for the Senate homeland security committee, disputed any parallel with China's censorship of the internet. "It is not at all the same," she said. "In China, there is a fiat from above."

Lieberman, she said, does not have the authority to shut down Amazon or tell it who its clients should be.

She said Lieberman is to write to Amazon asking for basic facts such as when it first realised that WikiLeaks was disseminating classified information.

In a blogpost on Thursday night, Amazon denied giving in to political pressure. It said WikiLeaks was violating its terms of service, which included a provision that the content should not be harmful. "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," Amazon said.

Lieberman and other senators are to introduce legislation that they have named the Shield Act that would allow the administration to go after WikiLeaks. But the bill stands little chance of passage as it would probably go not to the homeland security committee but the Senate judiciary committee, which is headed by Patrick Leahy, a Democrat and long-time champion of liberal issues.
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December 2nd, 2010
Amazon and WikiLeaks - Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary

by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann

The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment - but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government.

The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun to publish a trove of over 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, found itself kicked off of Amazon's servers earlier this week. WikiLeaks had apparently moved from a hosting platform in Sweden to the cloud hosting services available through Amazon in an attempt to ward off ongoing distributed denial of service attacks.

According to Amazon, WikiLeaks violated the site's terms of service, resulting in Amazon pulling the plug on hosting services. However, news sources have also reported that Amazon cut off WikiLeaks after being questioned by members of the staff of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman. While it's impossible to know whether or not Amazon's decision was directly caused by the call from the senator's office, we do know that Lieberman has proposed "anti-WikiLeaks legislation" and that he has a history of pushing for online censorship in the name of "security."

Importantly, the government itself can't take official action to silence WikiLeaks' ongoing publications - that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint, or censorship of speech before it can be communicated to the public. No government actor can nix WikiLeaks' right to publish content any more than the government could stop the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, which were also stolen secret government documents.

But a web hosting company isn't the government. It's a private actor and it certainly can choose what to publish and what not to publish. Indeed, Amazon has its own First Amendment right to do so. That makes it all the more unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer's right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs.

In the end, it's not just WikiLeaks that suffers from corporate policies that suppress free speech, here on matters of intense public importance. It's also readers, who lose out on their First Amendment right to read the information WikiLeaks publishes. And it's also the other Internet speakers who can't confidently sign up for Amazon's hosting services without knowing that the company has a history of bowing to pressure to remove unpopular content.

Today Amazon sells many things, but its roots are in books, which historically have been a lightning rod for political censorship campaigns. These campaigns tried and failed to suppress Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Nabokov's Lolita, and even Orwell's 1984. And it's the book industry - including writers, publishers, booksellers and libraries - that has championed the rights of readers and helped America maintain a proud history of free speech in the written word, even when faced with physical danger.

While it's frustrating to think of any hosting provider cutting services to a website because it considers the content too politically volatile or controversial, it's especially disheartening to see Amazon knuckle under to pressure from a single senator. Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon.
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Hal Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 December 2010 20.30 GMT

A WikiLeaks page: the decision by Amazon to take the site down, after it had already moved ISP to reduce its network's vulnerability to attack, has major implications for freedom of information and speech on the web, as only a handful of ISPs have the power to provide a secure service. Photograph: Alamy

For the past year, I've been working on a study on distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against independent media and human rights sites with colleagues at the Berkman Centre. The resulting report will be out shortly, but one of the main conclusions is that independent media sites are not capable of independently defending themselves of large, network based DDOS attacks.

There are many things an independent site can do to protect itself against smaller DDOS attacks that target specific application vulnerabilities (including simply serving static content), but the problem with a large, network-based attack is that it will flood the link between the targeted site and the rest of the internet, usually causing the hosting ISP to take the targeted site down entirely to protect the rest of its network.

Defending against these large network attacks requires massive amounts of bandwidth, specific and deep technical experience, and often connections to the folks running the networks where the attacks are originating from. There are only a couple dozen organisations (ISPs, hypergiant websites, and content distribution networks) at the core of the internet that have sufficient amounts of bandwidth, technical ability and community connections to fight off the biggest of these attacks.

Paying for services from those organisations is very expensive, though, starting at thousands of dollars per month without bandwidth costs, and often going much, much higher. An alternative is to use one of a handful of hosting services like blogger that offers a high level of DDOS protection at no financial cost. One of the recommendations we make in our report is for independent media sites that think they are likely to be attacked and want to be able to defend against themselves either find the resources to pay for a DDOS protection service or accept the compromises of hosting on a service like blogger in return for the free DDOS protection.

We make this recommendation with a great deal of caution, however, because moving independent media sites to these core network actors trades more freedom from DDOS attacks for more control by one of these large companies. It's great to be able to withstand a 10Gbps DDOS attack on YouTube, but it's not so great for YouTube to take down your video at its sole discretion for violation of its terms of service.

In general, these core companies have struggled in this genuinely difficult role. How is YouTube supposed to judge what to do when it receives complaints about a violent video in Arabic posted from Egypt? Do videos of police brutality qualify as the "graphic or gratuitous violence", which YouTube disallows in its terms of service?

So, with this context, I've been watching the WikiLeaks attack with great interest. It has been suffering a pretty big network attack (WikiLeaks claims about 10Gbps, which is big enough to take down all but a couple dozen or fewer ISPs in the world; arbor claims about 2-4 Gbps, which is still big enough to cause the vast majority of ISPs in the world major disruption). The attack successfully took its site offline at its main hosting ISP. WikiLeak's textbook response was to move to Amazon's web services, one of those core internet services capable of defending against big network attacks.

The move seemed to work for a couple of days, but then Amazon exercised its control, shutting the site down. Joe Lieberman claimed responsibility for Amazon's decision to take the site down. But Amazon responded with a message claiming that it made the decision to take the site down based purely on its decision based on its terms of service. The core of their argument is that WikiLeaks was hosting content that it did not own and that it was putting human rights workers at risk:

"for example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. 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. Human rights organisations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments."

If this is really how they made their decision, this is a worse process than merely succumbing to the political pressure of the US government. At least Lieberman is an elected official and therefore, to some degree, beholden to his constituents. Amazon is, instead, arguing dismissively that it made the decision based on its own interpretation of its terms of service. Without getting into the merits of either side, the questions of whether WikiLeaks has the rights to the content and especially of what level of risk of harm merits censorship are very, very difficult and should clearly be decided by some sort of deliberative jurisprudence, rather than arbitrarily and dismissively decided by a private actor.

This need for careful, structured and public deliberation on these questions is obviously balanced by Amazon's right to decide what to do with its own property. But as a society, we have reached a place where the only way to protect some sorts of speech on the internet is through one of only a couple of dozen core internet organisations.

Totally ceding decisions about control of politically sensitive speech to that handful of actors, without any legal process or oversight, is a bad idea (worse even than ceding decisions to grandstanding politicians). The problem is that an even worse option is to cede these decisions about what content gets to stay up to the owners of the botnets capable of executing large DDOS attacks.

• This article first appeared on Hal Roberts' blog at the Berkman Centre for internet and society