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Wikileaks has gone offline three times this week, causing debate over authorities taking censorship too far. France have joined with others in airing their views that Wikileaks should be taken offline permanently as activists raise comparisons with China's Google censorship.
Wikileaks was down again on Friday but later reopened via a Swiss domain. France have been outspoken in their condemnation of the site saying that it was ‘unacceptable' for a ‘criminal' site to be hosted in the country.
Amazon have already pulled the Wikileaks site from their servers after political pressure from Joe Lieberman the chairman of the Senate homeland security committee. While Amazon abided with Lieberman's instructions he is not yet finished with the store giant, saying that his plans are to find out their exact involvement with the leaks based website.
The issue, on a larger scale is quickly turning into a censorship debate, with many citing ‘freedom of speech' as a rule for its continued existance. The US Civil rights group Human Rights First, wrote to Amazon saying that their decision to cease hosting Wikileaks raised serious concerns and asked them to consider this before responding to Lieberman's request for more information.
Electronic Freedom Foundation members Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann said that 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”. Various blogs are even calling for a boycott of Amazon.
Amazon said in a blogpost that they denied caving into political pressure on the matter and they said it was simply a case of Wikileaks violating their terms of service, which included terms that the content should not be harmful.
In their own words “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.”
Kitguru says: Are you for the removal of Wikileaks, or do you feel that they should be allowed to leak sensitive information online?
first we shared music, now we share top info, later we want to decide / vote :E government . Is E world better ? You can’t avoid. can’t shutdown whole 250 k cables in pieces are 16.384 bit blowfish coded in movie torrents. WL just can post unlimited links. Can the free world survive transparency ? Can china ? You want to compromise transparancy ? Also for banks ? Again, you, the press, not even a supperpower is in control. Go with the flow…
I believe wikileaks has a right to print information it receives as long as it was obtained legally. This is the equivalent of making a living receiving knowingly stolen merchandise and then claiming innocence because you weren’t the one who stole it in the first place.