Can the US govt censor the web?
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The way that many US-based web companies responded to Wikileaks raises the question: does the country’s government control the Internet?
When ‘hacktivists’ successfully launched denial-of-service attacks against a number of web companies in retaliation for blocking transparency group Wikileaks in December 2010, many were surprised by just how effective an anonymous group of so-called hackers could be.
But the war over Wikileaks also revealed the power that another organisation wields over the web, namely the US government.
One of the first web companies to take action against Wikileaks was Amazon.com, on whose Amazon Web Services platform the group’s main site was briefly hosted. Amazon said it chose to remove Wikileaks from its servers because it broke its terms of use, and not due to any pressure from government. Credit card companies Visa and Mastercard also said that they blocked payments to Wikileaks because it violated their terms of service.
However, according to Professor Lilian Edwards, a legal academic at Sheffield University, Amazon had little choice but to take the material down. Under the US Espionage Act, the company would “clearly have been at risk of guilt as a person who ‘knowingly receives and transmits protected national security information’ if they had not taken [it] down,” Edwards wrote on her blog.
Other companies, including PayPal, the online payments service that blocked ransactions to Wikileaks’ funding account, and data visualisation software provider Tableau, which took down a graphical presentation of some leaked data from its public site, said they did so following encouragement from the US government.
The degree to which the US government did influence these moves is of particular significance given its professed dedication to ‘Internet freedom’. In a state visit to China in 2009, for example, President Obama rather pointedly observed that access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable.
And in a speech on Internet freedom in January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that although there is a risk the Internet can be used for destructive ends, “these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the Internet for peaceful political purposes”.
Dr Gus Hosein, visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, says the US government has shown it is prepared to influence Internet companies for political purposes
During the Bush administration and the War on Terror we didn’t see much exertion of things like the Patriot Act; it was all hypothetical. Now we’re seeing it live. This has shown that there exists an equivalent of the military industrial complex, but it’s the government Internet services complex.
Any company that has an office in the US would have to respond to such a request from the US government. So now you have to worry about being on the wrong side of political opinion among the US establishment. And if it’s Wikileaks today, it could be just about anything tomorrow.
Internet entrepreneur and author Tristan Louis is concerned by the absence of legal action before so many sites blocked Wikileaks
More troubling than anything else is that these actions against Wikileaks did not involve any legal recourse. I would be perfectly OK with a blockage of service if it were accompanied by legal injunctions, but the extra-legal nature of these blockages is of great concern.
I think the US government is going to have a very difficult time making their case the next time something like this happens in a non-US country. The corrosive effect of these actions is that [the US] can no longer claim the moral high ground when it comes to these issues.
