oh snap!

Wikileaks is getting a bit too full of itself.

@3 Government pressure curtailing the freedom of the press? Yeah, def not a 1st Amendment related issue.

Amazon's servers run a large % of the interwebs (as do Salesforce and Google).

SEE: Cloud Computing

All it took was one call from Sen. Lieberman's office? Wow. Noam Chomsky was right all those years ago. You don't have to censor speech in America - we'll do it voluntarily.

The First Amendment does apply to WikiLeaks, but not to Amazon's treatment of them. You can do whatever you want with your own services to shut down whatever you want. Lieberman had no card or authority to play here via Amazon beyond political pressure. He and Obama and the DOD have as much legal authority as of this moment over Amazon's business relationship with WikiLeaks as I do: jack and shit.

I'm hardly surprised if Amazon doesn't want this heat or to have to explain it to their shareholders, and if there is the chance they're hosting illegal content, they likely have a simple TOS exemption/backdoor out of anything like this, so WikiLeaks would have no recourse with them anyway. I can guarantee you that any sane hosting service will have a legally enforceable clause that basically says, "We can dump you for x, and we'll tell you want x was after we dumped you." They'd be mental to not have that. I speak with experience as someone that worked many, many years in the hosting industry.

Amazon are? Amazon is? Amazonians are? I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE

Meanwhile Americans are subject to search and seizure without warrant in their own country while traveling within our borders.

Hmmm.

Are you sure the Russians didn't win the Cold War?

It sure feels like it ...

Amazon is a business, they are going to be worshipping the greenback first, the first amendment second. They will prostrate themselves in front of the first amendment when censorship cuts off their revenue stream.

@2 Absolutely. What a bunch of adolescents.

Actually, they've probably been hoping for this to happen, so they could play up their victim complex and appeal to their fans' poor understanding of the first amendment. They're more like rock stars...faux adolescents.

Amazon isn't obligated to host anything it doesn't want to. If I were a business, I wouldn't want to host them either.

I hope this doesn't stop the bank docs from getting leaked. That's going to be some great stuff.

They dropped this faster than a pedophile

I don't blame Amazon, even if the government didn't pressure them. They became the second largest target of online attacks after Iranian nuclear programs because of Wikileaks.

That said, I've a feeling Wikileaks will be just fine without it.

Guise, the First Amendment has nothing to do with it. This is like when Laura Schlessinger was pressured to resign after dropping a barrage of N-bombs and Sarah Palin started complaining about her First Amendment rights.
Amazon is a private company. If an employee or client is exercising their right to free expression in such a way that it impacts their business (such as by generating bad press), they're free to take action.