Amazon has pulled its support for WikiLeaks servers, the site said Wednesday.
"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free--fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe," WikiLeaks tweeted this afternoon.
In the wake of its most recent document dump, WikiLeaks this week was hit with a denial of service attack, prompting it to change hosting providers. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told PCMag earlier this week that WikiLeaks' servers were hosted in France at the time of the initial attack, but it then switched to two different servers hosted by Amazon's cloud; one of which is located in the U.S. The site was later hit with a second DDoS attack this week.
That support is apparently no more. "If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books," WikiLeaks said in a follow-up tweet.
WikiLeaks later said it "is the first global Samizdat movement," referring to grassroots efforts in Soviet-era Russia to reproduce and distribute censored documents. "The truth will surface even in the face of total annihilation," the group said.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It has been a busy week for WikiLeaks. After releasing more than 250,000 State Department cables over the weekend, the site was widely condemned by the White House and the State Department; a New York congressman also called for WikiLeaks to be designated as a terrorist organization.
The leak has prompted some government action, however. On Wednesday, the White House announced that Russell Travers has been named as the National Security Staff's senior advisor for Information Access and Security Policy.
"Travers will lead a comprehensive effort to identify and develop the structural reforms needed in light of the Wikileaks breach," the White House said. His duties will include advising the National Security Staff on corrective actions, mitigation measures, and recommendations related to the breach, as well as facilitating interagency discussions and developing options for policy changes that would limit the likelihood of another leak.
The President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) has also been ordered to take an independent look at how the Executive Branch shares and protects classified information. Each federal department and agency that handles classified data, meanwhile, must establish a security assessment team to review their procedures for safeguarding classified information against improper disclosures. More details are available on the White House Web site.