US political heavyweights have forced Amazon to remove controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks from its server.
According to The Guardian, the online retail giant was contacted by the office of Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate committee on homeland security, 24 hours before Amazon took the site down from its servers.
Wikileaks has claimed that the ousting breached freedom of speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.
Legal experts however claim that Amazon, being a private company, was free to act on its own accord and that there has been no such breach.
Lieberman said in a statement that: “[Amazon’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 organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them”.
The Wikileaks website, which was inaccessible from the US and Europe for some time yesterday after being removed from Amazon’s servers, has now been moved to servers located in Sweden.
Read the full Guardian report here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon
