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Comment by brianr | Hacker News Reader

This is very interesting. If Wikileaks does in fact become designated a terrorist organization by the US, then it seems Amazon will have to shut them down or run the risk of providing them "material aid".

The same would be true of any other cloud provider... are there any sizable cloud providers outside the US?

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The overheated rhetoric spewing from some politicians notwithstanding, I can hope that no court of law will be persuaded that there can be a terrorist organization without weapons, indeed without violence of any kind.

(Even if Assange has committed some violent crime on his own -- and I am not saying he has -- this is clearly not the purpose of the organization.)

Does the government still need to go through courts when dealing with "terrorists"?

There is actually a bit of judicial review in the case of designating terrorist organizations, though I don't know how thorough. Here's Wikipedia on how terrorist organizations get designated, and how they can challenge it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._State_Department_list_of_F...

If Wikileaks is a terrorist, then so too is the New York Times, and any other media outlet that has conveyed the same information Wikileaks released.

Bingo. Bob Woodward publishes leaks like this all the time in his books. Some of it is TS stuff, too, IIRC.

That is a logical fallacy.

Cloudsigma is based in Zurich, Switzerland and seems to be fairly big. They should be able to cope with this kind of attack:

http://www.cloudsigma.com/

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