Just a week after it cut off the whistle-blowing website from its servers, Amazon is selling a version of the WikiLeaks diplomatic files. The cables (available free of charge all over the internet) have been turned into a Kindle e-book by an enterprising Amazon user, Heinz Duthel.
The price of the whistle-blowers’ efforts? Yours for £7.37.
On 1 December Amazon became the first website to stop hosting WikiLeaks on its servers, a move praised by the US government.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, derided the retailer and denied that the loss of Amazon’s support would seriously hinder WikiLeaks’s ability to publicise the files.
“Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases,” he told the Guardian.
Amazon is the latest website to have been targeted by the hacker group Anonymous, whose members have already launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, all of which have frozen WikiLeaks bank accounts.
It didn’t take long for irate shoppers to start registering their displeasure on Amazon, either:
Sarah: “Hm, would Amazon let me buy this using my PayPal account? What about my Visa or Mastercard? Considering all those companies stopped supporting WikiLeaks, it would be pretty messed up if I could use them to pay Amazon. Wait a second . . . Didn’t you guys, like, totally chicken out and dump WikiLeaks from your servers because mighty Lieberman sneezed?”
Michael Mcconnel: “If the leaking of this information constituted a threat to US security, wouldn’t selling it constitute espionage/treason? You better hope someone DDOS attacks your site before the US notice or you could be looking at a regime change pretty soon.”
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