Amazon, Wikileaks and dual standards

On Monday we asked "what does wikileaks hope to achieve" via chucking out a lot of stuff that actually shows the limits to usefulness of zero privacy sites like itself.

Today we ask what Amazon was thinking when we read that that Wikileaks were chucked off Amazon's US servers, at the behest of Senator Joe Liebermann. If ever there was a red flag for any organisation looking to host controversial content or data on Amazon, this was it.

There is also a certain amount of double standardry going on here:

Firstly, we see no evidence that Senator Liebermann has gone after the hosting & distribution systems of the other disseminators of the same data, ie the TV masts, printing presses and newspaper kiosks of the good old USA Media. In other words, it would seem not the information that's at issue, its which medium is used to disseminate it. That Internet is clearly a bad, bad thing whereas the same stuff broadcast over TV and Newspapers is just fine.

Secondly, it shows just how quickly the land of The Brave and Free can close down information it doesn't like - as opposed to say those Evil Nazi Commie (insert your favourite islamic/pinko/ totalitarian/oligarchicl dictatorship/junta/cronydom here) that the US loves to excoriate for their anti-free-information-flow policies.

And of course Wikileaks is already up and running, in Sweden, so the net effect of all the sturm and drang, apart from Amazon and the US Government showing their hand, is minimal.

Send the Marines.....

(Update - as others have pointed out, this is the same Amazon that "redacted" Orwell's 1984 on the Kindle and only pulled paedophile books thereon when a national campaign was launched. Truly one must choose one's freedom of speech battles carefully )