Wikileaks is at the center of a storm over its publication of US military documents, with Amazon removing the site from its servers while Sarah Palin calls for its founder to be hunted a terrorist.
Under pressure from the US government, Amazon has taken down Wikileaks from cloud servers days after the site migrated to its EC2 cloud infrastructure.
In a statement, US Senator Joe Lieberman – the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee – said that Amazon told him they had decided to terminate their relationship with Wikileaks.
His office had sent Amazon a “please explain” notice Tuesday about its hosting of the controversial leaked material.
“I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier,” he said. “The company's decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally-seized material.”
Wikileaks on Sunday published the first batch of over 250,000 leaked cables believed to have been illegally acquired by a US soldier from the worldwide Siprnet US military and government network.
The company drew the ire of the US military last month by publishing documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Reacting to the ban, Wikileaks tweeted that “[i]f Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
The Wikileaks website was down briefly on Wednesday, but is accessible as of today, apparently hosted on servers in Europe.
Former vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin this week called on the Obama administration to pursue Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with the same urgency the state hunts al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
In a post on her Facebook page, Palin called Assange “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” and claimed past leaked documents had revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban.
Wikileaks has this week also been grappling with a sustained DDoS attack believed to have been arranged by hacker activists.
International police co-operation agency Interpol has meanwhile posted details of an arrest warrant for Assange over the rape allegations that some have suggested are part of a black operations campaign to discredit him.
The Independent has claimed, citing sources, that Assange is in the UK and police know his location, but have so far refrained from arresting him due to technical delays.
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