AWS and Freedom of Speech?
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BuzzBy John McEleney
The blogosphere and twitter have been in overdrive the past couple of days with the removal of WikiLeaks from AWS. The reaction and condemnation of Amazon has been swift and often brutal – charging the company with censorship and cowardly behavior. Consider the announcement from WikiLeaks on Twitter:
“WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free — fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe.”
Even the New York Times is fanning the flame by suggesting that Amazon yielded to political pressure from Senator Lieberman: “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world,” Mr. Lieberman said. “No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”
It’s very clear that WikiLeaks violated their terms of service; in fact Amazon posted this announcement on their AWS site:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. 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.
I believe the decision by Amazon was neither censorship nor cowardly. If I had to choose a word to express the action taken, I would call it consistent. It is consistent with the agreement that end users accept when they use AWS. I applaud Amazon for taking this action. While there are valid arguments for both sides of the WikiLeaks issue, these are part of a much broader debate over the democratization of information enabled by the internet and the moral code that journalists in the print media have lived by for so many years. For Amazon, the issue is more specifically related to the nature of the WikiLeaks content.
Sometimes it is useful to examine this type of decision at a personal level. Imagine that tomorrow someone steals some of your own personal property and tries to sell it on eBay. Wouldn’t you expect eBay to respond to your request by removing the offending posting? That’s exactly what Amazon did – once alerted to the fact that WikiLeaks was using AWS to distribute material that did not belong to them, Amazon took the controversial, but proper step (consistent with their terms of usage) of discontinuing WikiLeaks’ service.
Conspiracy theorists will say that Obama and half the government called Jeff Bezos and demanded that he stop WikiLeaks or else… my guess is that the truth is that the AWS team simply looked at the material and made the decision to terminate their access because it violated their terms of usage.
This is plain and simple – no major conspiracy, no attack on freedom of speech, just consistent business practices – which is exactly what you and I should expect from a leading cloud provider.
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