It’s not as simple as theprez98 would like it to be(free speech/1st amendment).

The implication regarding Rights and constitutional protection of amazon’s autonomous speech right is far from evident. Follow the supreme court history Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 65 > Buckley v. Valeo 424 U.S. 1 (1976) > Bellotti, 435 U.S 435 U.S > Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 130 S.Ct. 876c. There you’ll find the line of reasoning (while i strongly disagree with the courts argument) where the Right for the listener is one of unobstructed listening, ergo passive speech. Evidently, Wikileak is a new twist to the discourse of free speech. That is, what about the right of free speech pertaining to market leaders (large corporations), thence, their refusal of speech, i.e. suppressing passive free speech.

Ceteris parius, the passive right to speech is very much in line with the courts quantitative argument. It says, the more information there is disseminated, the more speech there is, the more freedom of speech there is, etc.

IMMI proposes a set of airtight legal protections for data hosts on Icelandic soil. However, this doesn’t fix something like Amazon Web Services, which has bundled a giant swath of hosting environments with the business interests of Amazon.com, a company that enjoys highly beneficial tax considerations with the US government. These private hosts could act differently on US soil — legal protections for hosts here aren’t bad — but they choose not to because the participation of political minorities is less important than not drawing bad press to their brand or business interests. There is no first amendment of private hosting, and that’s a problem.

Best,
Jonathan at Global Integrity

I have a question about the claim that there is only a handful of hosts who can keep material available while withstanding a DDoS attack. I understand that in practice the cables are distributed using BitTorrent. WikiLeaks needs to reach initial downloaders, but once the torrent is seeded, all that needs to be distributed is a link to the torrent. This is lightweight, can be rapidly posted in many places (Twitter, Facebook), and is easily re-blogged by sympathisizers. If there is sufficient interest, it quickly becomes nearly impossible to shut down the p2p torrent distribution of the actual “publication” by either government action or DDoS.

Is there really a need to push high-powered hosters to host material beyond their Terms of Service? Or do we simply need to ensure that services like Twitter and BitTorrent are available to any and all?

I agree, but is there any nation in the world courageous enough to do this? I’d been thinking Sweden, but they’re obviously caving. Switzerland, maybe? Australia? What do you think?