How Lieberman Got Amazon To Drop Wikileaks
Early this week, after hacker attacks on its site, Wikileaks moved its operation, including all those diplomatic cables, to the greener pastures of Amazon.com's cloud servers. But today, it was down again and mid-afternoon we found out the reason …
Context & Ripple Effects
The eviction closes a fast loop: after distributed attacks knocked its own site around — the resilience limits Wired's Threat Level examined in August — WikiLeaks shifted its cables archive onto Amazon's cloud this week, and Senator Joe Lieberman's pressure ended the arrangement within roughly a day. The syndication footprint alone (TechCrunch, Associated Press) shows how quickly a hosting decision became a national story.
It also rhymes with an older pattern: back in 2008, WikiLeaks lost its domain name and turned to legal help after the deletion of its wikileaks.org registration. Each time, the organization has been pushed off one piece of American-run internet infrastructure and re-homed elsewhere.
First-order effects
- WikiLeaks loses its U.S. cloud tenancy hours after moving onto it, forcing another migration of the cable archive — this time presumably to hosts outside American jurisdiction.
- Amazon demonstrates that a single senator's public statement is sufficient grounds to terminate a customer relationship on its flagship cloud service, with no published contract dispute or technical cause.
Second-order effects
- Every other cloud provider weighing WikiLeaks' business must now price political exposure into the deal, since accepting the archive invites the same congressional scrutiny Amazon just absorbed.
- WikiLeaks' supporters and mirror operators gain a recruitment argument: the episode hands them proof that U.S.-based infrastructure cannot host the material reliably, accelerating moves toward distributed mirroring.
Third-order effects
- If one lawmaker can evict a tenant by press release, cloud contracts become an instrument of state pressure rather than pure commercial terms — buyers handling politically sensitive data will increasingly weigh provider jurisdiction alongside price and uptime.
- The WikiLeaks saga is establishing a repeatable playbook — attack the site, squeeze each successive chokepoint (domain registrar, then cloud host) — which pushes such organizations toward architectures designed to survive the loss of any single vendor or country's infrastructure.
The trend: Cloud computing is colliding with its dependence on U.S. political jurisdiction, as providers discover that hosting controversial clients makes their infrastructure a lever lawmakers can pull.