Let Amazon know we're boycotting them because of Wikileaks
thepoint.com
thepoint.com
I mean really, Amazon is my favorite Big Company right now. They have all sorts of really cool services to make it easy for small businesses to do their thing. And every month or so they send me an email telling me that they just made one of those services cheaper.
They also manage to stock every single item of anything that I've needed to buy online in the last several years, and are capable of getting it to me in 2 days without any hassle whatsoever. They do all the creepy user-tracking stuff that every other big company does, but somehow manage to pull it off in a way that is not only not creepy, but actually makes me happy. Hey, Amazon just told me about the new Black Keys album. That's something I might actually consider buying. Thanks Amazon!
So yeah, no. I'm not planning to boycott them over some silly internet controversy that they didn't want anything to do with. Pick a better company like PayPal or eBay or Microsoft or Facebook or pretty much anybody and I'm with you. But lay off Amazon. They're cool.
Yes, Amazon's response to this was really weak and cowardly, but let's not lose sight of who is the real villain in this case — Joe Lieberman and whatever other elements of the government are complicit in trying to shut down free speech.
I'd rather boycott Washington D.C. than Amazon.
Whether it's true that to continue hosting Wikileaks would amount to martyrdom may depend on how widespread the support for Wikileaks is. This success or failure of this pledge campaign will give some indication of that.
In any case, there's no question that pols are to blame. But for better or worse, I hold Amazon to a higher standard than I do politicians.
WikiLeaks offered the government a chance to review the cables before they went online. They made the offer to ensure that the leaked documents would not jeopardize lives. The government declined. To date, no leaked documents by WikiLeaks have resulted in any harm coming to any individual. While the past cannot be used as a measure of the future, it does support the notion that such releases will likely cause intractable harm in reputation rather than flesh.
Although WikiLeaks does not own the content, the scope of the content reveals a problem with the United States: that people in power are more corrupt than could otherwise have been known. If exposing truth and honesty while holding governments and corporations accountable to moral lessons of right and wrong is insufficient cause for Amazon.com to overlook its self-imposed terms of service, then the owners of Amazon.com have taken the moral low-ground. And I shall have nothing to do with them.
This a complex issue, with many arguments on both sides, yet one fact remains: WikiLeaks has published Truth. And if Truth stirs trouble, then we, as a society, have failed. We have failed our peers. We have failed our governing. And we have failed our children.
And now? I shall tell hundreds of friends.
Your expectations from Amazon, while noble, unfortunately do not translate into what is practically tactical for Amazon from a business' point of view. Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality.
Of course they would, and you know they will. Or do you really believe that Amazon will refuse to carry any product, over the coming years, that quotes from the leaked documents that are already in the public domain?
"As crass as it may sound, Amazon's in it for the money, not international politics."
Of course, and that's why a boycott is an appropriate response from people who feel negatively towards their decision; to submit to political pressure, and selectively apply their terms of use rules.
"Any other US host would have yanked wikileaks out too. It is unfair to only subject Amazon to such high morality."
I disagree. Whichever US host dropped wikileaks under these circumstances would have been a legitimate target for a boycott.
Amazon faced a difficult decision for sure, but handled it exceptionally badly wrt maintaining customer trust. Had there been even a hint of contrition in their statement, I (and I'm guessing others) may have felt less animosity towards them.
"If you get a national politician unhappy with your product, they do have a history of pulling the plug on people, see wikileaks".
While that's not a boycott, that is a move from a strong buy to a "consider other options if you have any chance of pissing someone off".
I do think Joe Liberman single handedly handed cloud computing to non-american countries though with his stunt. Why base your cloud here when your company gets better data protection in :insert jurisdiction which doesn't give a crap about Joe Liberman's threats:
As EFF says "Other Internet intermediaries should now expect to receive a phone call when some other member of Congress is unhappy with speech they are hosting. After all, it worked on Amazon."
The average consumer has no clue that amazon has anything to do with the tech industry. To most people it's just an online store.
More on why a boycott could have a big impact at http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=2201
But I'm saying that the vast majority of Amazon's customers are not software developers. They're soccer moms, busy middle class honest workers who don't know a damn thing about AWS or even that Amazon had anything to do with wikileaks.
They don't care. They'll buy from wherever is cheapest/most convenient.
The soccer moms, teachers, honest workers, etc. in my and my SO's family would almost certainly honor our requests to "please don't get us anything via Amazon" -- especially if we give them alternative sources. Some of them would be interested enough in it that we'd discuss it and probably convince at least a few that this is a serious problem and they want to get involved. Most people have at least a few friends who are sympathetic; as people start posting about it on Facebook, others will see and at least a few will decide to get involved. Plus there are some family mailing lists (mostly used to exchange bad jokes) and people there tend to defer to my expertise on computer stuff. So we'll probably pick up a few more there ...
And internationally, my guess is that feelings are a lot stronger. It's fascinating watching the discussion on Twitter -- there's so much in other languages. Initial momentum for a boycott seem strongest in Spain right now ... and no surprise, given the revelations in the cables. From abroad, it looks like an American company trying to censor the world's access to information, so I could imagine a boycott having a bit impact there.
I'll probably get downvoted for saying 'obtained illegally', but I'm talking about the guy who downloaded the docs, not the guy who posted them. I think the worst Wikileaks could be charged with would be purchasing stolen property.
> Amazon should be made aware of the scale of public opposition to what they’ve done.
> If we reach at least 1,000 people, then We will each mail Amazon letting them know why we won't be buying from them anymore.
> 1%, 989 people to go
If that's not irony, I don't know what is.
In any case, I don't see the objection here. A lot of Internet warriors seem to be almost zealous in their support of Wikileaks and their belief that the various large-scale releases they have made recently are somehow changing the nature of society and making governments fundamentally more transparent.
Wikileaks are quick to say that governments have not identified specific people hurt or killed because of the leaks. However, looking at things from a slightly more neutral point of view, it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect. They have created a lot of hype, disruption and embarrassment, but where's the huge smoking gun? I'm in the UK, and so far there has been commentary on our politicians as with many other places, but there's no evidence that our government ordered a hit on Dr David Kelly, or that Tony Blair had more information than we already knew from the public inquiries about whether Iraq really had WMDs, or that our then-government's support for the US action against a lot of popular opinion was a result of some corrupt deal for personal gain by the politicians calling the shots. Frankly, the leaks have so far been rather anti-climactic.
Also, just as an aside, the whole "we offered to let the government help us vet the material" argument is just transparent politics. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of documents. To even try to vet that data in any useful depth, the time needed from security-cleared and fully informed officials, and the amount of taxpayers' money it would cost would be staggering. Please don't tell me Wikileaks weren't well aware of that. And that's without even getting into the "we don't negotiate with enemies" ethics.
Given this sort of mess, I don't blame Amazon for not wanting any part of it. The fact that Wikileaks and various embarrassed government officials are having a very public pissing match is not a reason for independent businesses to start taking sides. More pragmatically, given the aforementioned lack of any real substance in the leaks, it is highly likely that the governments are going to win this one, and no business on the scale of Amazon wants to be out of favour with major national governments. There just isn't anything in it for them.
'it seems equally true that Wikileaks haven't really told us anything big we didn't already know, or at least suspect' I disagree on this and they aren't done yet. So you don't know what is next. Besides, why would you shut something down that isn't a real threat(yet)?
As for the rest of it, we've been hearing that Wikileaks are not done yet for a long time. If they are genuinely interested in transparency rather than raising their profile and/or causing extended embarrassment to people they don't like, then why haven't they just published everything on their web site for all to see? Transparency theatre is becoming as tedious (and unconstructive) as security theatre, and it's time for Wikileaks to s@#t or get off the pot.
I think Wikileaks is hoping that over time, the repetitive anger at them becomes boring, whilst the corruption they uncover becomes the more interesting part of the story.
I suspect they are deliberately releasing only mildly embarrassing information at first as a form of innoculation so that when they get to the really damaging stuff Wikileaks itself will be old news and people will focus on the more unpleasant truths.
I appreciate that you probably hadn't seen it when you wrote the parent post, but it appears that the big Wikileaks story for today is a list of facilities that are considered critical to US security.
I'm not sure I see any corruption exposed, or any other public interest for that matter, in publishing such information openly. How can this possibly do anything except make it easier for the bad guys to cause significant damage?
If they carry on in this direction, releasing ever more sensitive information that really might have national security implications, then I can only see any public support they have deteriorating and the arguments of governments that some information must be kept secret for national security reasons being strengthened.
The end result will probably be a terrible disappointment for conspiracy theorists, reassurance to many people that most of our governments are not in fact secretly planning world domination and merely make mistakes from time to time, and a new era of locking down anything that might be considered even remotely sensitive within governments to the extent that we might even see changes in the laws that currently protect whistle-blowing that is genuinely in the public interest.
It would be an ironic, and unwelcome, legacy for Wikileaks if its big campaign ultimately resulted in more people believing in arbitrary government secrecy and tighter controls on free speech just in case anyone else as irresponsible comes along in future.