WikiLeaks / Amazon Bask
Hey kids, I am working on a response to Justin Raimondo’s love letter. Can someone help me out with the timeline of events? For example, I am pretty sure that right-wingers were calling on people to boycott Amazon for hosting WikiLeaks, before Lieberman got involved. Can someone help me out with that? (E.g. link to Bill Kristol or Sean Hannity or somebody ripping on Amazon, at an earlier date than Lieberman’s phone call?)
Also, can somebody pin down exactly when Amazon must have known its client was WikiLeaks? In other words, I’m trying to figure out if the top dogs at Amazon knew for months that WikiLeaks was signed up to use their servers, or if they might not have even realized it until Amazon’s main host went down and they switched to Amazon.
Dr. Murphy,
You are right. This isn’t a libertarian issue per se.
Having some inside knowledge of Amazon, though, I don’t think it is out of the question that they had no idea they were hosting WikiLeaks. At any rate, they may have misjudged the political establishment’s unity and ferociousness on an issue like this (if they had asked us, we could have forewarned them).
Justin is also right, though. You can’t just get involved and then back down cowardly. You are either in the fight — and this is a property rights issue — or you back down cowardly and cede that your rights are mere privileges granted to you by the likes of Joe Lieberman. What is rational is for you, me, or Amazon is to lie down and shut up in the face of Leviathan… but we know that if everyone does that, there is no hope and that’s just plain unacceptable in my opinion. That’d be like Ron Paul running for president in 2012 and saying he was wrong about foreign policy and that we really should “bomb bomb Iran”. He has every right to do it, but that it would be cowardly and completely unacceptable, as it would only further empower the beast.
Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal have all cut off WikiLeaks.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2010-12-07-visa-wikileaks_N.htm
If Justin is as principled as he claims to be, he should boycott the services that these companies provide. Credit cards (Visa and MasterCard presumably) and PayPal are two of the donation options at Antiwar.com. I assume that they will be removed promptly?
http://antiwar.com/donate/donate.php
Justin was very clear that there can be no compromise:
I didn’t directly bring that stuff up in my rebuttal, since I’m not trying to start a war.
The banks are a bad example anyway, since they are regularly colluding with government to literally loot from us. They ought to be boycotted for those reasons.
That’s the problem with boycotts, though, especially in a world where government restricts your options. The government’s “services” ought to be boycotted first and foremost, but good luck with that.
Why doesn’t Raimondo boycott Google, a far more serious and culpable offender in the areas of free expression, privacy, and intellectual property – one known to have bowed to Chinese state pressure, while also cooperating with US domestic espionage?
What is this “thing” about Amazon that Daniel Ellsberg seems to have?