Liminal states

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Comments

1. jon | 02-Dec-10 at 7:56 pm | Permalink

   Amazon’s statement denies that it was government pressure:

   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. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.

   A lot of people have also pointed out that there were actually only a few hundred cables being hosted there, and they actually had been redacted. Details, details.

   Read Write Web points out that by this standard, Amazon wouldn’t have let people host the Pentagon Papers. Good insight.

2. jon | 02-Dec-10 at 7:57 pm | Permalink

   Meanwhile, Tableau Software, a small Seattle firm, removed visualizations of the Wikileaks data in response to Lieberman’s comments.

   To the right is a screenshot from Techdirt. Clearly a threat to democracy.

   In the Guardian, Charles Arthur reports:

   James Ball, who created the visualisation, told the Guardian: “The Cablegate graphs Tableau pulled from their servers contained no information directly from US data. They gave indications of cables from each country, classifications, and subject tags (such as IMF, human rights or economic issue) – exactly like graphics published in print and online by the Guardian.

   The comments on Tableau’s site are overwhelmingly against their decision, including people saying “won’t use Tableau Software anymore,” “time to start shopping around for new visualization tools,” and “companies who are unwilling to support free speech do not receive my support.” Yeah really.

   ---

   December 4: Curtis Cartier’s Tableau Software Boots WikiLeaks Without Prodding, Finds Swift and Harsh Backlash Among Users in Seattle Weekly has a bit more on Tableau’s decision and the reaction, including this:

   One thing that Tableau does not address in its statement is the fact that when it originally began in 1997 it was at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense. The agency had then contracted Stanford Professor Pat Hanrahan to create a new kind data sharing software that eventually spun off into what the company is today.

   With a genesis tied so closely to the U.S. government, it would be understandable that such a company would decide that dealing with a website with contributors whom major politicians are calling to be executed is not worth the trouble.

   Unfortunately, Tableau only lists the flimsy “everyone-else-is-ditching-WikiLeaks-so-we-should-too” excuse and its users aren’t buying it.

3. Quora | 02-Dec-10 at 8:26 pm | Permalink

   Why did Amazon pull the plug on Wikileaks and will it bite them?…

   In addition to Werner Vogels answer to “why” above, there’s also speculation that they did this in response to threats of a boycott from people opposed to WikiLeaks

   And it very possibly could bite them.  There’s starting to be discusison of a cons…

4. jon | 03-Dec-10 at 7:51 am | Permalink

   Julian Assange responding to a reader’s question in The Guardian:

   Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.

5. jon | 03-Dec-10 at 7:57 am | Permalink

   Rebecca Mackinnon’s WikiLeaks, Amazon and the new threat to internet speech is a great look at the issues. Some excerpts:

   While Amazon was within its legal rights, the company has nonetheless sent a clear signal to its users: If you engage in controversial speech that some individual members of the U.S. government don’t like — even if there is a strong case to be made that your speech is constitutionally protected — Amazon is going to dump you at the first sign of trouble.

   Let’s hope that there will always be other companies willing to stand up for our rights as enshrined both in the U.S. Constitution and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and by extension their right to do business with us.

   The future of freedom in the internet age may well depend on whether we the people can succeed in holding companies that now act as arbiters of the public discourse accountable to the public interest.

6. jon | 03-Dec-10 at 8:17 am | Permalink

   Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hoffman of EFF, in Amazon and WikiLeaks – Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary:

   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.

   But a web hosting company isn’t the government. It’s a private actor and it certainly can choose what to publish and what not to publish. Indeed, Amazon has its own First Amendment right to do so. That makes it all the more unfortunate that Amazon caved to unofficial government pressure to squelch core political speech. Amazon had an opportunity to stand up for its customer’s right to free expression. Instead, Amazon ran away with its tail between its legs….

   While it’s frustrating to think of any hosting provider cutting services to a website because it considers the content too politically volatile or controversial, it’s especially disheartening to see Amazon knuckle under to pressure from a single senator. Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon.

7. libhomo | 03-Dec-10 at 6:24 pm | Permalink

   I canceled my Amazon account, and I haven’t even started my Solstice shopping.

8. jon | 04-Dec-10 at 9:24 am | Permalink

   Well done! I’ve gotten emails from three friends who have canceled their accounts as well.

   In case anybody’s wondering, I don’t have an Amazon account. For a while it wasn’t really a policy on my part; I just prefer to buy books in independent bookstores, and I’m lucky enough to spend a lot of time in cities like Seattle and San Francisco to have them. But then after their embrace of DRM for the Kindle and #amazonfail, I decided that they weren’t the kind of company I want to give my money to.

9. jon | 04-Dec-10 at 9:26 am | Permalink

   Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, has written an Open Letter to Amazon.com. Some excerpts:

   I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

   For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I have contacted Customer Service to ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

   I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives. I’ve removed all links to Amazon from my site, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, IndieBound, Biblio and others.

   Daniel goes on to call for Amazon insiders to leak information about what political pressures were brought to bear — a position enthusiastically endorsed by Andy Greenberg of Forbes.

   Adding a personal note: back in 2008 when I was helping organize the Get FISA Right protests on my.barackobama.com, email went across the list from somebody named Daniel Ellsberg. I sent him mail saying “you probably get this all the time, but by any chance are you the Daniel Ellsberg?” Much to my delight, it was, and we struck up an email conversation. Wow! My dad was an anti-war college professor back in the day, and so I grew up seeing Ellsberg as a hero — which he continues to be. And his book Secrets gets more interesting every time I reread it and see how the Bush regime paralleled so much of the Johnson/Nixon Vietnam era.

10. jon | 04-Dec-10 at 11:04 am | Permalink

    Add PayPal and their owner eBay to the list of companies choosing not to stand up for free speech. They’ve has suspended Wikileaks’ account for violating their Acceptable Use Policy, specifically the clause that “our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

    On Wired’s Threat Level Kevin Poulsen comments

    PayPal’s public statement doesn’t detail the “illegal activity” WikiLeaks promotes, but presumably it’s the leaking of classified information. Sometimes such leaks are indeed illegal. And sometimes classified leaks — legal or not — reveal warrantless wiretapping of Americans, secret CIA prison networks,and massive government waste hidden in black budgets. The reasoning PayPal offers for its newfound intolerance for WikiLeaks would seem to apply equally well to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    Indeed.

    Nothing new here, of course: PayPal’s well known for suspending accounts and freezing business’ money for all kinds of different reasons. For businesses, Web Distortion has a handy list of 17 PayPal alternatives.

11. jon | 04-Dec-10 at 11:32 am | Permalink

    On the Boycott Amazon for Dumping Wikileaks Facebook page, I saw a post from Paganarchy Press that they asked their distributor not to sell their books via Amazon. In a comment on their Facebook, they explain why:

    I think it comes down to me making this sacrifice in order to ensure global truth be told. I know you post many articles promoting radical tellings of the truth and this is my bit towards that goal… So for now I am willing to go without Amazon

    Kudos to them!

    While checking out their Facebook, I saw that they had just released a book called LIBER MALORUM: Children of the Apple. Cool cover art, and since I just finished writing a draft novel for NaNoWriMo g0ddesses.net involving the famed Golden Apple of Discord, I decided to check it out. Here’s the blurb:

    The biggest slice of collaborative magical fiction since the bible.” When Bernadette breaks into her ex-boyfriend’s house to steal his laptop, little does she realise the enormity of what she has let herself in for. Join Bernadette as she is unwittingly drawn into a bizarre yet uplifting circus of sex, drugs, music, witchcraft, anarchy and apples. Liber Malorum is an extraordinary serpent of a journey that weaves into the kaotic underbelly of civilisation. It spins through the myths and legends of an eclectic mix of 23 authors into a dangerous anti-authoritarian tapestry of spell-binding proportions. This is a call-out for the tearing down of fences, beliefs and boundaries. It is an intriguing seed of disobedience planted into the fertile soil of the strangest world: our own. A juicy, delicious apple of a book. “Harry Potter – if Irvine Welsh had written it!!” – Katherine Lambert

    Cool!

    As I wrote on Paganarchy Press’ Facebook, I know what I want for the holidays!

12. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 9:43 am | Permalink

    A few tweets from the last ten minutes:
    

    

13. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 10:07 am | Permalink

    From ALT1040 in Spain, a pair of posts. Eduardo Arco’s Se convoca a un boicot a PayPal y Amazon por negar el servicio a WikiLeaks is a short description of the reasons people are boycotting, and Elías Notario’s Ayudemos a WikiLeaks: recursos para hacerlo has instructions about how to donate to Wikileaks, boycott Amazon and PayPal, and mirror the site.

    On Twitter, I saw ALT1040 described as the “largest tech blog” in Spain. Considering the Wikileaks revelations about the US pressuring Spain to head off court investigations into Guantánamo Bay torture allegations, rendition, and the killing of a Spanish journalist by US … I can see why people there might not be too happy with Amazon.

14. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 10:17 am | Permalink

    Here’s what OpenBSD’s Theo de Raadt said after removing links to Amazon from their site :

    the project has in the past received a small pittance of money for sales
referrals to amazon, but it is wrong to accept this bribe money from such
people. instead, we will let people who want these books make their own
decisions as to where to purchase books.

    for more details, read
http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/why_amazon_caved_and_what_it_m.php?page=all


15. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 10:20 am | Permalink

    Alejandro Ribó’s Letter to Amazon: Why I closed my accounts after your censored Wikileaks challenges Amazon’s reasoning for closing down the site, and ends with

    In my opinion, Amazon.com’s action is a blatant attack on freedom of expression and the right of citizens to access the information that is theirs. Therefore, I do not wish to have any relation with your organization.

16. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 10:34 am | Permalink

    

    Esperanza Hernández’ Convocan boicot contra Paypal y Amazon por darle la espalda a Wikileaks, on FayerWayer, has a great graphic and some excellent framing: the Empire strikes back, and social networks spring to Wikileaks defense.

    Todos contra Wikileaks. O Wikileaks contra todos. Desde que vio la luz, la web de revelaciones ha asestado duros golpes a la diplomacia norteamericana, y ahora es la presión del Imperio la que contraataca.

    Esta semana han perdido el alojamiento, han perdido el nombre de dominio y ahora pierden a Paypal como herramienta de recepción de las donaciones para mantener su funcionamiento.

    Pero Wikileaks no está solo: Las redes sociales se han volcado en su defensa, por lo que se está convocando una jornada de boicot contra Amazon y Paypal que incluye no comprar nada en la web líder de comercio electrónico en norteamérica, ni realizar transacciones a través del servicio de pagos en línea.

    Hooray for “las redes sociales”!

17. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    Of course there are a range of opinions on Amazon’s actions. As I write this, the most popular comment in the Hacker News discussion Let Amazon know we’re boycotting them because of Wikileaks asks how to let Amazon know he approves of what they’ve done and isn’t boycotting. But it’s far from the only view.

    Here’s thangalin’s comment

    Dear Amazon.com,

    WikiLeaks offered the government a chance to review the cables before they went online. They made the offer to ensure that the leaked documents would not jeopardize lives. The government declined. To date, no leaked documents by WikiLeaks have resulted in any harm coming to any individual. While the past cannot be used as a measure of the future, it does support the notion that such releases will likely cause intractable harm in reputation rather than flesh.

    Although WikiLeaks does not own the content, the scope of the content reveals a problem with the United States: that people in power are more corrupt than could otherwise have been known. If exposing truth and honesty while holding governments and corporations accountable to moral lessons of right and wrong is insufficient cause for Amazon.com to overlook its self-imposed terms of service, then the owners of Amazon.com have taken the moral low-ground. And I shall have nothing to do with them.

    This a complex issue, with many arguments on both sides, yet one fact remains: WikiLeaks has published Truth. And if Truth stirs trouble, then we, as a society, have failed. We have failed our peers. We have failed our governing. And we have failed our children.

    And now? I shall tell hundreds of friends.

18. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 11:35 am | Permalink

    In I am Boycotting Amazon for the Holidays, Al Sweigert discusses why he’s removing kids programming book “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” from Amazon’s CreateSpace service:

    CreateSpace.com continues to be a great service, and it makes it easy to publish on Amazon.com. But after Amazon.com has expelled WikiLeaks from its web hosting service, I have decided to pull my book from Amazon and boycott their site for the holiday season.

    I encourage others to do the same.

    It will cost me over a grand this month to not sell my book, but it will cost Amazon (by my estimates) twice as much. In the end though, it probably hurts me more than it affects a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon. But I feel it’s the right thing to do, and that often doesn’t come cheap.

    I understand that Amazon has a duty to its shareholders to protect its business interests and entangling itself with powerful political cronies does not help its bottom line. But this is why it is up to us to make defending freedom of speech one of its business interests. Amazon’s own claims that it pulled WikiLeaks for violation of its Terms of Services and not due to political pressure are equally lame and preposterous. We must vote with our voices and our pocketbooks, and I hope to set an example for others with my actions.

    Al adds that he’ll be taking a look at Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Biblio and others for gifts this year. Good advice for all of us!

19. jon | 05-Dec-10 at 11:42 am | Permalink

    Quick digression: in Is Twitter Barring Wikileaks From Its Trending Topics Lists?, Angus Johnston looks at allegations that Twitter has been manipulating “trending topics” to reduce Wikileaks visibility. Great data and analysis.

    And Daniel Putsche tweeted a nice screenshot of intense discussion on the PayPal Deutschland Facebook page.

20. jon | 06-Dec-10 at 9:37 am | Permalink

    Dave Winer’s Boycott Amazon? Not doing it, on Scripting News, gives his following reasons not to boycott:

    1) he’s not sure he wouldn’t have done exactly what they did
    2) Amazon’s got competition so it’s not that big a deal if they don’t stand up for free speech
    3) he depends on Amazon a lot
    4) last time he boycotted Amazon (over one-click), some other open tech advocates didn’t so he felt his stand was pointless

    Given all that, his conclusion:

    All these things weigh in a decision as to whether or not to make a principled stand.

    And it adds up to this, now, re Amazon: Not even a close call.

    It’s fascinating language. Rarely do I see people so explicitly discuss their decision not to be principled. As cent says it he comments

    Business over priciples is how we got here. Amazon makes a fortune off “freedom of speech”. What do they give back to it in return?

    You are justifying a sell out to consumer convenience, which is also how we got here. Where does it end? Can’t beat’em, join’em? No Sale.

    Guan Yang argues that this may turn out to be a bad business decision:

    Can you really trust Amazon as a host when you know that they might shut you down if what you publish generates controversy? The lesson for hosting customers seems to be that you can’t really rely on cloud services when you need to, and I’m not sure that’s a lesson Amazon should want to teach.

    Even if you don’t boycott Amazon for principled reasons, I think all hosting customers should be very concerned about this development.

    ---

    Update: the Hacker News discussion has more. Dave characterized my summary as “nasty”, and hasn’t replied to my followup. Based on the voting, a majority of folks saw it the way I did. Here’s what Andrew Cooke had to say:

    Why “nasty”? Seems like a decent summary.

    Anyway, I just bought a bunch of books from abebooks.com rather than amazon.com. Save a pile of money :o) but (I assume) they will not be new and shiny 🙁

21. jon | 06-Dec-10 at 9:50 am | Permalink

    The Math Gladiator also made an anti-boycott post:

    WikiLeaks right now is a giant pile of shit from a legal standpoint, and Amazon must uphold its terms of service to protect legitimate customers (like me). If Amazon gets sued and bankrupt, then I’m absolutely fucked.

    WikiLeaks is basically a homeless beggar looking for places to take a shit, and they are going to shit on your carpet. Would you let that happen to your home? Of course not.

    There’s a lot in common with Dave’s response here …

22. jon | 06-Dec-10 at 10:43 am | Permalink

    There are also some better-argued cases for not boycotting. Bob Murphy’s post on LewRockwell.com is a good example, and so is Cori’s response to Dave Winer.

23. Jon | 06-Dec-10 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    “If Amazon gets sued and bankrupt, then I’m absolutely fucked.”

    What a statement.

24. jon | 06-Dec-10 at 11:24 am | Permalink

    Ola Bini’s Boycotting Amazon and PayPal:

    Amazons decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks is said to have been based on terms-of-use violations, however – these violations didn’t stop Amazon from hosting WL the last two times – and there are many other web sites on Amazon that have likewise questionable content. If anyone where to write a book based on the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, would Amazon not sell it then? I can’t help but believe that the real reason Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks had to do with pressure applied from Joe Lieberman and the US Government. As far as outside observers can determine, there seems to have been no legal process – but rather just a phone call from Liebermans department. It sets a very dangerous precedent when a large company and a de-facto common carrier folds like this from Government pressure….

    For many reasons, these three incidents have convinced me that I have to make a moral stand and boycott Amazon and PayPal – I have cancelled my accounts. I urge you to do the same if you feel that the last few days events have been a dangerous precedent.

25. Victor | 07-Dec-10 at 4:10 pm | Permalink

    Canceled both, my Amazon and my PayPal accounts. Extremely disappointed in both businesses. That is not the way to do business. It’s a pure “head in the sand” approach to solve problems.

26. jon | 09-Dec-10 at 11:15 pm | Permalink

    In PayPal Busted for Bogus Wikileaks Excuse in Valleywag, Ryan Tate reports:

    Facing a booing crowd in Europe, a PayPal executive tried to explain why his company blocked donations to Wikileaks. He cited a letter from the State Department calling the secrets-sharing site illegal. Sadly for him, no such letter exists.

    Speaking at the LeWeb conference in Paris, PayPal VP Osama Bedier faced “boos from the mostly European audience” when he was asked why PayPal froze Wikileaks’ account. He responded:

    “On Nov. 27, the State Department – the U.S. government, basically – wrote a letter saying the Wikileaks activities were deemed illegal in the United States.”

    As the New York Times has now pointed out, that’s simply not true.

    Oh snap. Here’s what the Times said:

    In that letter, however, [State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Hongju] Koh did not argue that publication of the documents by WikiLeaks, or any media organization, would be illegal. Instead, Mr. Koh wrote that the documents “were provided in violation of U.S. law” to WikiLeaks, which means that the State Department considered the original leak of the documents to Mr. Assange’s organization to have been a criminal act.

    Meanwhile, Senators Lieberman and Collins praised Amazon.

27. jon | 09-Dec-10 at 11:24 pm | Permalink

    

    Avaaz and CREDO Action have launched a petiton, to go with ones from CODEPINK and Charles Davis on Change.org

28. jon | 09-Dec-10 at 11:57 pm | Permalink

    In Anonymous stops dropping DDoS bombs, starts dropping science, Boing Boing summarizes:

    The new approach suggests more sophisticated thinking. This new mission, apparently, is to actually read the cables Wikileaks has published and find the most interesting bits that haven’t been publicized yet, then publicize them.

    Good pivot.

    In comments, tamgoddess observes

    Thank God I don’t have to do anything. I’m a girl.

    And mikep adds

    Is it just me or does anyone else feel like they’re in the last ten pages of a Neal Stephenson novel? The bit where all the various plot lines start bashing into each other with real force?

29. jon | 10-Dec-10 at 11:20 am | Permalink

    Of course not everybody supports Wikileaks. On TechCrunch, Paul Carr thinks Everyone at Le Web is Wrong: Wikileaks Should be Condemned not Celebrated:

    I hate Julian Assange. I hate the way he’s posing as a champion of truth and justice whilst hiding in the shadows and resorting to blackmail in a drawn-out attempt to avoid having to answer criminal charges in a publicly-accessible court of law. I hate the fact that he’s trading on a myth that We The People have a right to know everything our governments are saying and doing in our name when, in fact, we elect people to act in our best interests on a global stage without necessarily giving us a heads up every time they want to have an off-the-record chat with a dictator. (If every tiny decision has to be made based on how it will play in public, then we’ll soon end up with a whole load of crowd-pleasing decisions but very little actual diplomacy. Palling around with Chinese leaders or Arab kings might be a strategic no-brainer but it doesn’t play great in the heartland.)

    Also, I hate his hair.

    They don’t think much of Paul’s post in the comments:
    

    

    Hagbard Celine is one of the protagonists in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus trilogy. Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

    PS: yes, that’s the same Paul Carr who made a racist joke about Mexicans in his blog post about TechCrunch disrupt.

30. jon | 10-Dec-10 at 11:50 am | Permalink

    From Amazon Take Down of Wikileaks – Is the Free Internet Dead?, with The Real News Network’s Paul Jay interviewing Marc Rotenberg of EPIC, Rebecca Parsons of Thoughtworks in Bangalore, and Tim Bray (formerly of Sun):

    JAY: … And, again, WikiLeaks is not the one directly charged with stealing something. But the interesting thing is Julian Assange has threatened that the next round of leaks is about banks, and if there’s anything explosive in there, these attempts to shut down WikiLeaks might increase. And certainly if anyone has the connections to pull some strings in terms of this area it’s banks, ’cause everyone’s going to them for their cash, including the Amazons of this world. Marc, let’s move back into the legislative side. So there’s been no due process. But what do you see as some kind of process people should actually be demanding to stop this from happening on a broader scale?

    ROTENBERG: Well, I thought it was very interesting that after Amazon decided to toss WikiLeaks off their servers, Daniel Ellsberg wrote to Amazon and said that he would no longer be a customer of that company, because he thought that they had abrogated their important obligations to protect intellectual freedom. And he noted, of course, that Amazon was built around the dissemination of books and ideas. Boycott is a strategy, but it’s never been particularly effective in the online world. I don’t know that that’s going to have a huge impact.

    We shall see …

31. jon | 10-Dec-10 at 12:42 pm | Permalink

    In Can Free Speech Be Protected on a Private Internet? in Der Spiegel, Konrad Lischka comments:

    There is a saying “pick your battles.” Well, Internet giants Amazon and PayPal have clearly decided not to join the fight for WikiLeaks. They are avoiding conflict and have thrown out the activists by pointing to their terms and conditions. They have the right to do so. Companies should be allowed to be cowards, if the risk seems too high for them….

    Yet these calls for a boycott should be welcomed. They could show the companies that the situation is actually the exact opposite to what they had assumed: that perhaps they have been wrong in their appraisal of the reaction to WikiLeaks and have actually annoyed more customers than expected with the block. Then perhaps the next time they will do things differently.

    What is really of concern is how quickly the companies made these decisions. Their way of dealing with controversies can only harm the Internet, regardless of what one’s stance is on WikiLeaks. These positions are so contrary — treason vs. serving the public good — and the contentious issue is so fundamental — what can citizens publish? — that it should be a question for the courts.

    Well said. Speaking of which, there’s a protest scheduled at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle on Monday.

32. Liminal states :: Calling the Troops to Battle: EFF’s Say No To Censorship Campaign | 10-Dec-10 at 3:00 pm | Permalink

    […] have also been incredibly successful.  So if they decide to get involved with something like an Amazon boycott, it could make a big impact — especially if they can work effectively with other […]