Amazon, Tableau Fold Like Cheap Suits on WikiLeaks Scandal

WikiLeaks' Twitter stream

Already someone with a lively sense of irony has visited Amazon's listing for the book The Pentagon Papers, writing:

Amazon pulled Wikileaks from their site because it represented classified government documents. So what is the Pentagon Papers still doing on this site? Oh right, Amazon wasn't around in 1971 to cave in to pressure from right wing politicians to betray the First Amendment right to publish classified materials that have been leaked by others.

TechFlash reports that Pentagon Papers-leaker Daniel Ellsberg himself is calling upon Amazonians to get into the transparency habit:

This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear—and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses—to leak that information.

At issue is Amazon's claim that because WikiLeaks violated their terms of service hosting agreement by posting material they didn't own, Amazon was forced to terminate their hosting services--that is, it wasn't in response to governmental suasion.  The Stranger's Paul Constant isn't buying it: "They need to issue a brief, clear statement on their information policies so consumers know where they stand with Amazon. If they're not going to fight for their customers' rights, their customers need to know that."

Amazon's hosting of the material aside, Salon's Glenn Greenwald can't understand why Tableau, a Seattle interactive graphics software company, also agreed to pull WikiLeaks charts in response to a request by Senator Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "These charts contained no classified information whatsoever, and disclosed nothing about the content of the cables," writes Greenwald. (See an example here.)