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. Read more.