Amazon.com: A Profile in Cowardice

It pains me to say this, as it will no doubt make my holiday shopping that much more difficult, and good god do I hate going to the mall, but: it's time to boycott Amazon.com.

Caving to pressure from pompous windbag (and, unfortunately, Connecticut Senator) Joe Lieberman, the online retail giant on Wednesday severed ties with the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, which had recently moved its site to Amazon's servers. The move came less than 24 hours after Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee -- thanks Democrats! -- had requested the company do just that.

“This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website," Lieberman said in a statement. "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. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."

Lieberman, not surprisingly, is physically incapable of telling the truth. While WikiLeaks has indeed released thousands of Pentagon documents and State Department cables exposing official wrongdoing and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan -- no wonder the good senator, who has backed every U.S. military action since the War of 1812, is so upset -- those documents were not "illegally seized," but rather leaked to WikiLeaks. While the person who leaked the information may have very well broken some (bullshit) laws in the service of the greater good, WikiLeaks is merely a conduit for that information, like The New York Times was when it published the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war.

That distinction is important because 1) it means Attorney General Eric Holder and the band of Outraged! U.S. politicians calling for WikiLeaks' destruction have no legal ground to stand on, as Bloomberg notes, and 2) that WikiLeaks did nothing that would violate Amazon's terms of service, which prohibit illegal activity. Yet Amazon nonetheless cowardly kicked WikiLeaks off its servers without notice, forcing the site to shut down for several hours, all because someone in the government told them to, which Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes sets a damn bad precedent for free speech; if a U.S. politician doesn't like something he or she sees on the Internet, all they need to do is have some underpaid staffer place a callm and *poof* it's gone.

Antiwar.com's Eric Garris, meanwhile, points out that if WikiLeaks had wanted to sever its business relationship with Amazon, it would have had to give a 30 day heads up. But "Amazon.com gave no such notice," he writes, "they just unplugged the servers." Despite making more than $10,000 from Amazon's affiliate program, Garris says Antiwar.com will be boycotting the company from here on out. And he recommends you do the same.

As a private company, Amazon is of course free to do what it wants with its servers -- it's not bound by the First Amendment. But the public is also free to spend its money elsewhere, perhaps with companies less willing to stifle speech at the behest of the government.

If the same company that remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from its Kindle reading device wants to regain the public's trust (and its holiday shopping dollars)? Well, that's simple: I propose Amazon make amends by agreeing to host WikiLeaks on  its servers -- but this time for free.

Photo Credit: Amazon.com