I don’t think most people in the US realize how important Wikileaks is and why Julian’s case needs support. @wikileaks

– Oliver Stone, via Twitter , criticizing upcoming films based on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

Photo: Rubra/Ars Electronica (Creative Commons)

WikiLeaks, the organization that collects and publishes sensitive information from anonymous leakers the world round, claimed on Friday an affiliation with Aaron Swartz, the Internet rights activist who committed suicide last week.

The disclosure came in a series of tweets from the official WikiLeaks Twitter account, one of the few main outlets the organization uses for external communications.

“Due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement with #AaronSwartz we have decided to disclose the following facts (1-3),” the first of four tweets read. The second: “Aaron Swartz assisted WikiLeaks #aaronwartz.” The third: “Aaron Swartz was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011.” And the final tweet: “We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source. #aaronswartz”

Elliot Peters, Swartz’s attorney before his death, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the extent of Swartz’s relationship with WikiLeaks remains unsubstantiated, the allegations come in the wake of public outcry over the Department of Justice’s decision to prosecute Swartz to the fullest extent of the law. U.S. Attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann sought heavy penalties against Swartz if he did not plead guilty to charges of computer fraud, wire fraud and others. Swartz faced upward of 30 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

The fact that WikiLeaks decided to out its connection with Swartz, as was first noted by The Verge, could suggest that part of the DoJ’s and Secret Service’s investigation and prosecution of Swartz had to do with ties to the famed whistle-blowing organization.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

If Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.

– Julian Assange, speaking at the Ecuadorian embassy in London

Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, told reporters in Quito Thursday that the country had granted Mr. Assange asylum to protect him from alleged “political persecution” in the U.S., which Mr. Assange argues wants to prosecute him for WikiLeaks’ role in publishing thousands of classified U.S. government documents.

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“As we said in our brief, ‘Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content,’” Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee said in a statement provided to AllThingsD. “Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

Twitter’s filing comes after Harris’s initial motion to quash was struck down in court. The court found that Harris lacked the legal standing to challenge the request for Twitter information on his own behalf.

Harris, a senior editor at online publication The New Inquiry, was arrested in conjunction with a massive Occupy Wall Street protest last October that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. He was one of more than 700 people arrested.

In Harris’s defense, Twitter cites the First Amendment as grounds for support, contesting that “content that Twitter users create and submit to Twitter are clearly a form of electronic communication that, accordingly, implicates First Amendment protections.” Twitter also contends that the request is a Fourth Amendment violation (unlawful search and seizure, for those of you who skipped PoliSci 101).

The reasoning behind Twitter’s motion most likely boils down to two things: First, if Twitter users as a whole don’t have sufficient standing to defend themselves against subpoenas for information, it then becomes Twitter’s responsibility to do so. With a subscriber base of more than 140 million active users, that’s a lot of litigation to sort through. It’s simply a scaleability issue. So, on the one hand, Twitter filing a motion that would essentially put the defense back in Harris’s hands is essentially Twitter practicing enlightened self-interest.

But in another, more gallant way of viewing the case, the motion signals just how strong Twitter is on the right to privacy of its user base. Aside from safeguarding against a future of similar requests, Twitter doesn’t have to stick up for its users like this.

“In Internet meme parlance, Twitter is basically telling the government: ‘Come at me bro,’” privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian told AllThingsD in an interview.

And it’s not the first time Twitter has stood up to the government. Late last year, Twitter challenged a court order requesting information on a number of people involved with WikiLeaks, including Julian Assange. Specifically, Twitter challenged a “gag order” included in the request, which specifically barred the company from telling WikiLeaks members that the government was requesting their account information. By challenging the order, Twitter effectively let these account holders know that the government was going after their information, which allowed them in turn to defend themselves against the government requests.

This may not sound like much. But most of this litigation is dealt with by outside counsel which Twitter hired specifically to deal with these cases, and that isn’t cheap. And there’s no direct financial incentive for the company to stand up against a request for information such as this one.

In all, it’s a bold move by the microblogging company, and one it isn’t required to make.

Here’s the promo, released this morning. The first episode, featuring Assange chatting up bird-flipping Super Bowl performer M.I.A., runs April 17. WikiLeaks says you should be able to watch it on the Web and via Russian cable news network RT, which you can get in the U.S. via the Dish Network and on some Comcast and Time Warner Cable systems.

WikiLeaks says Assange has taped 12 of these so far. I hope one of the guests turns out to be Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader.

This was a very apolitical group that had absolutely no understanding about the military-industrial complex whatsoever, and no understanding about international finance. As a result of joining our battle and trying to protect themselves, they have come to see that the threats related to Internet freedom come from the military-industrial complex, the banking system and the media.

– Julian Assange, in Rolling Stone, referring to Anonymous

The accounts in question belong to Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic lawmaker who assisted with WikiLeaks’ release of a U.S. military video that had been classified; Jacob Applebaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer based in Seattle; and Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen who is co-founder of the Internet service provider XS4ALL.

The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia had filed an order in December seeking IP address and other Twitter account information relating to several users connected to WikiLeaks, including its head, Julian Assange.

Buchanan turned away arguments by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and private attorneys saying that the privacy of their accounts were protected by established federal law and the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment.

Twitter account holders have “no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses,” Buchanan said, and federal privacy law was not relevant because prosecutors weren’t seeking the contents of the communications and, aside from direct messages, their tweets are public already anyway.

Twitter said in a statement that its policy is “designed to allow users to defend their own rights,” and that it will “let the judicial process run its course.” An appeal to a higher court is expected.

This case emerged in January, when Twitter notified several users that federal prosecutors had obtained a court order for their account information.

The five range in age from 15 to 26 and were arrested in early-morning raids on their homes. They’re accused of being involved in distributed denial-of-service attacks, where groups of users flood a Web site with more traffic than it can handle, thus slowing its performance to a crawl.

!n 2010 the group claimed responsibility for attacks on several Web sites, in apparent sympathy with WikiLeaks–the secret-exposing site that last year unleashed a barrage of previously confidential U.S. diplomatic cables. Targets of Anonymous included the Web sites of PayPal, Mastercard and Visa Europe after those companies stopped financial contributions from going to accounts belonging to the WikiLeaks organization. The action was dubbed “Operation Payback.” The police declined to say which attacks the five arrested are alleged to have taken part in.

Amazon was thought at one point to have been a target when its service went down briefly in December at a moment that coincided with chatter that Anonymous wanted to attack it. The company later said it had suffered a brief hardware problem.

Calling Anonymous a group is a bit misleading. Most of the people who chose to participate in one of its attacks did so by downloading software to their computers called the Low Orbit Ion Canon. Attacks were organized on the channels of Internet Relay Chat, and coordinated orders for all participants to “fire” their weapons were issued on Twitter. The software running on each desktop would then simulate legitimate Web requests to the target site, inundating it with so many requests that it would be overwhelmed and effectively rendered useless.

Earlier this month the group had trained its sights on Web sites belonging to the government of Tunisia, following civil unrest there, and just yesterday it was said to be attacking sites in Egypt.

This is the second round of arrests related to the attacks. Two teenagers in the Netherlands have also been arrested–one said to be connected to the attacks on Visa and Mastercard, the other allegedly involved in an attack on the Web site belonging to a Swedish prosecutor investigating sexual assault charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

And speaking of Assange, CBS just announced that he’ll be interviewed by Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” this Sunday. Here’s hoping that prompts a new Assange sketch from “Saturday Night Live,” like the one below from December.

Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

Of course, he won.

Dominating tech’s mindshare and press coverage in 2010, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs also handily took the No. 1 slot of a reader poll conducted by BoomTown in the last days of year.

Jobs–who introduced a range of innovative products, such as the iPad, over the course of the 2010–garnered just over 30 percent of the votes for the question that asked: “Who are the 10 Most Interesting People in Tech in 2010.”

Among the reasons he was selected, from comments posted by those who took the survey:

“With the iPad, he’s re-inventing the personal computer. Again.”

“Because he never stops.”

And my favorite: “Because if he had to be dictator of the world, he’d actually take doing a good job of it seriously.”

And, despite not acing him out for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” WikiLeaks head Julian Assange got 16.3 percent for the No. 2 spot, followed by Facebook’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at 10.1 percent.

Said one voluble commenter: “Whether one agrees or not with the how, governments and the individuals in power tend to do things that, we as a public, need to know, given that their actions, ultimately, impact how we must live our lives. Assange, is merely bringing to light things that many would rather not have brought into the light of day. One could argue that we do not need to know, for security or other reasons. However, negotiations, diplomacy and conflict, are all simply ways or resolving issues. Since, as a public, we allow these people into power, should we not know they are acting on ‘our behalf’?”

Arguing for Zuckerberg and his increasingly powerful social networking site, one person said: “Changed the way we looked at the Web and added another layer of connection between user and the Web, as well as sites connecting to each other.”

A wide range of people, not included by name on the list I compiled, got the No. 4 slot with 7.3 percent. They included Google Android head Andy Rubin, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Arianna Huffington and, um, me!

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was No. 5 at 6.3 percent.

“Visionary as a grad student, very successful as an entrepreneur, now doing some really interesting things as a VC,” said one person.

The red-hot attention around social buying start-up Groupon–and its gutsy choice not to take Google’s offer of billions of dollars–got co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason the No. 6 slot with 5.7 percent.

Pure curiousness about the future outcome spurred one choice: “Is he really lucky or really good? I’m guessing 2011 is a fairly decisive year. I’d like to know more about him…”

The mishegas around Yahoo and its voluable CEO Carol Bartz put her in the No. 7 position.

Said one commenter: “She’s taken the impossible job and will succeed. However, rewiring is taking more times than expected…”

Innovation put social magazine iPad app Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue at No. 8 with 2.3 percent.

No. 9 was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the same percentage, with the inevitable Betty White clocking in at No. 10 with 2.1 percent.

The reason for picking the longtime Hollywood movie and television star, after lobbying by rabid Facebook fans got her a gig on “Saturday Night Live”?

Simply put: “She rocks.”

And, indeed, she does.

Here’s my lovely bar chart showing the winners, which, perhaps most fascinating of all, did not include anyone from search topper Google or software giant Microsoft or microblogging leader Twitter (click on the image to make it larger):

Here the WikiLeaks leader comments on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently beating him out for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The faux Assange is not happy that social networking beat out classified documents.

This skit–the third so far–seems to be getting funnier each time:

“The easiest way to shut down Wikileaks would be to have Yahoo! acquire it.

Web strategist and blogger Ed Kohler, offering the U.S. government some free advice, via a very popular tweet.

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel writes:

In a sense, Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange’s case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg’s case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people.

There’s not much in the way of new info about Zuckerberg and Facebook in all the materials. It’s pretty much the standard stuff from the great Zuckerberg relatability tour of 2010 after his sweaty meltdown in an April interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D8. (Many mentions of the longtime girlfriend, recounting of childhood pranks, highlights of interests listed in Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, etc.)

Time profiler Lev Grossman works hard to get to the heart of Zuckerberg (whom he seems to have fallen in love with, just a little). Here are a few of Grossman’s more interesting assessments of how Facebook sprung from the mind of Zuckerberg:

On inspiration:

The reality is that Zuckerberg isn’t alienated, and he isn’t a loner. He’s the opposite. He’s spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome. Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn’t build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his.

On the big goal:

Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You’ll be working and living inside a network of people, and you’ll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.

On privacy:

Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

(Of course, Twitter hasn’t revealed the secret formulas that helped it aggregate, tabulate and rank these topics.)

In the Twitterverse, after the BP oil spill and soccer, the next most popular topic of conversation in 2010 was the movie “Inception,” followed by the Haiti earthquake and the vuvuzela. The iPad, Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter and Pulpo Paul round out the top 10. It’s an odd list, indeed.

The person most discussed on Twitter in 2010 was obviously he of the dedicated servers, Mr. Bieber. (It’s somewhat shocking that world events and tech gadgets were able to keep the teen phenom out of the overall top spot.) Beating out her royal highness Lady Gaga, the No. 2 person on Twitter was Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff (pictured).

Here’s the full 2010 list, courtesy of Twitter, followed by 2009′s list for comparison.

2010 Twitter Trends

Overall Top Trends:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

News Events:
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. Haiti Earthquake
3. Pakistan Floods
4. Koreas Conflict
5. Chilean Miners Rescue

People:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Dilma Rousseff
3. Lady Gaga
4. Julian Assange
5. Mel Gibson

Movies:
1. Inception
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
4. Despicable Me
5. Karate Kid

Television:
1. MTV Video Music Awards
2. Pretty Little Liars
3. True Blood
4. Walking Dead
5. Grammy Awards

Technology:
1. Apple iPad
2. Google Android
3. Apple iOS
4. Apple iPhone
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops

World Cup:
1. FIFA World Cup
2. Vuvuzela
3. Pulpo Paul
4. Dunga
5. Diego Maradona

Sports:
1. LeBron James
2. Wimbledon
3. Manchester United
4. Brock Lesnar
5. Celtics

Hash Tags:
1. #rememberwhen
2. #slapyourself
3. #confessiontime (hash tag started by Usher)
4. #thingsimiss
5. #ohjustlikeme

2009 Twitter Trends

News Events:
1. #iranelection
2. Swine Flu
3. Gaza
4. Iran
5. Tehran
6. #swineflu
7. AIG
8. #uksnow
9. Earth Hour
10. #inaug09

People:
1. Michael Jackson
2. Susan Boyle
3. Adam Lambert
4. Kobe (Bryant)
5. Chris Brown
6. Chuck Norris
7. Joe Wilson
8. Tiger Woods
9. Christian Bale
10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies:
1. Harry Potter
2. New Moon
3. District 9
4. Paranormal Activity
5. Star Trek
6. True Blood
7. Transformers 2
8. Watchmen
9. Slumdog Millionaire
10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows:
1. American Idol
2. Glee
3. Teen Choice Awards
4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)
5. Dollhouse
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)
8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)
9. BET Awards
10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues):
1. Super Bowl
2. Lakers
3. Wimbledon
4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)
5. Superbowl
6. Chelsea
7. NFL
8. UFC 100
9. Yankees
10. Liverpool

Technology:
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld

Hash Tags:
1. #musicmonday
2. #iranelection
3. #sxsw
4. #swineflu
5. #nevertrust
6. #mm
7. #rememberwhen
8. #3drunkwords
9. #unacceptable
10. #iwish

Aside: Remember when NBC and “Saturday Night Live” didn’t really want their stuff on the Web? Now they make stuff designed for Internet distribution–note shout-outs here to Amazon, Orbitz, Facebook, FarmVille, Netflix and Angry Birds. And porn!

This is SNL’s second crack at Assange. Last week, it imagined what he’d do if he morphed into Harvey Levin. Also quite good!

But he says he has now reconsidered and wants the book sold, after all–even if it angers some WikiLeaks supporters.

To recap: Amazon received a storm of criticism yesterday for selling this oddly named e-book “WikiLeaks documents expose US foreign policy conspiracies. All cables with tags from 1 5000,” even though Amazon has refused to host WikiLeaks documents themselves.

Amazon’s common-sense answer to critics was that the book is commentary and analysis about the WikiLeaks data and that it intended to keep selling the title.

Later on Thursday, the book disappeared from Amazon’s shelves, and Amazon said it had been “removed by author.” But now it’s back once again.

What happened? I asked author Heinz Duthel to explain. We’ve corresponded via email, and while there’s a bit of a language gap (he’s a native German speaker), I think I understand the gist of the story: Duthel’s instinct after receiving threats was to yank the book, but now that he’s had time to think it through, he wants to sell it after all.

Below, an edited version of my correspondence with Duthel. I’m leaving his responses in their original form rather than risking making an inaccurate guess while cleaning them up:

December 9
Peter Kafka: I see now that the book is no longer available at Amazon’s store. The listing there says it has been “removed by author.” Can you please explain why you wrote the book, why you published it and why you decided to remove it?

December 10
Heinz Duthel: Yesterday I had a shocking day (at age 61) with my III. book about Wikileaks. I did remove the book after I received about 60 emails (anonymous) with insults like ‘after finish with paypal, mastercard, amazon’ we will remove you and all your books from the web’, ‘we know who are you and we will take care about you singing daughter (she is 15 and started to make some music since 2 years) and so on. Amazon.com did send me one email (Stephanie Derouin of Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing (DTP) Executive Customer Relations. Can you please confirm that this is your intent? You may email me at [xxx]@amazon.com. ) so I replied that I have removed the book because I don’t want that amazon.com is hacked only because of my wikileak book.

Since then one of my domains, heinzduthel.com has to be removed from my hosting company because of high cpu usage. This from 1:30 till 5:50 European Time. Now the domain is back again (amazon shop script) but I had to clean the cache for 2 hours on the domains, because it look like I had a few hundred thousand ‘visitors’.

Kafka: Your book now appears to be available on Amazon again. If that’s true, why did you decide to do so given the threats, etc.?

Duthel: I am surprised it is online again because I left this up to amazon.com in my email as you have seen. I think there is no reason why it should not be online, because I think the comments bellow the book atamazon.com are not justified at all.

…honestly this book (Wikileaks IV) is nothing else then just about Assange, Wikileaks and why, what, question marks, comments etc.

This book is in fact something for readers interested to know what is going on or what is Weakileaks and have no time to search the whole internet, sources, media, press etc.

Kafka: I am surprised to read that you’re surprised it’s now available. Did you specifically tell Amazon to remove your book? And are you okay with the fact that it’s available once again?

Duthel: Peter, to question I:

Here is the email after I have removed the book and Amazon did ask me if this has been my intent.

Dear Miss Stephanie

No it has not been my intent, I have just been informed after reading the news in Google.com that maybeamazon.com would have or get problems from all this hackers or world regulators, like Mastercard, Visa or Paypal. So this is not my attention.

I think this book like any other has the right to be online and no one can or has the right to commit extrajudicial proceedings against books or publication.

But you can see all this supporters of Wikileaks and Julian Assange black mail each and every one who is against their self proclaimed freedom of press.

After talking with my family Lawyer this evening in France he suggested to place back the book or books as it is up to Amazon to decide what is wrong or good and not some self appointed world regulators outside there…

To question II.

Yes I am OK if the book is online and available because it has been the reason why I wrote the book, but I left this up to amazon.com because I don’t want to be responsible if because of this book amazon.comget problems, hackers or what ever.

A judge at London’s Westminster Magistrates Court ordered Mr. Assange remanded into custody until Dec. 14. Bail was denied Mr. Assange despite offers from several individuals including filmmaker Ken Loach, English socialite Jemima Khan and documentary filmmaker John Pilger–to post £20,000 ($31,444) each for his bail.

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WikiLeaks portrayed PayPal as bowing to government pressure. Another company, DataCell, which describes itself as under Swiss and Icelandic control, says it is accepting donations on behalf of WikiLeaks. And the organization says there are other options for supporting the organization financially.

Like Amazon and EveryDNS before it, PayPal said that WikiLeaks had violated its Acceptable Use policy, which says the service “cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

In response to Amazon’s move, Daniel Ellsberg, the man known for leaking the Pentagon Papers and whose story has recently been retold in a 2009 documentary film “The Most Dangerous Man In America,” has called for a boycott of Amazon, saying he wants “no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.” He further asks Amazon insiders who may have documentation of what political pressures were brought to bear to send what files they have to WikiLeaks.

Amazon maintains its decision was motivated by nothing more than a Terms of Service issue, and it’s “inaccurate” to consider its move a response to a government inquiry.

First, the site Wikileaks.org was dropped by its domain name services provider last night and so has been forced to relocate to another domain name, within Switzerland’s top-level domain. The site can now be found at Wikileaks.ch, which forwards directly to an IP address. WikiLeaks’ former provider, EveryDNS, said in a statement that it took the action because of the numerous denial-of-service attacks that had been carried out against the original domain. More from the Guardian here.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman has introduced legislation that would criminalize the publication of the name of any U.S. intelligence source. (Wait, that’s not already illegal?) “Our foreign representatives, allies, and intelligence sources must have the clear assurance that their lives will not be endangered by those with opposing agendas, whether they are Americans or not, and our government must make it clear that revealing the identities of these individuals will not be tolerated,” Lieberman said in a statement. It’s called the Shield Act, and you can read it here.

Then France is getting into the act. Le Point reports that Eric Besson–minister of industry, energy and the digital economy–has asked a government regulator to look into ways to block French Internet companies from hosting the files in that country. A Google translation of Le Point’s story is here.

Finally, Amazon issued a statement giving its side of the story on how it came to terminate its relationship with WikiLeaks, which had briefly been a customer of its Amazon Web Services. It wasn’t the DDOS attacks, it says, nor government pressure, but that WikiLeaks was violating several requirements of its Terms of Service agreement. For one thing, WikiLeaks was required to represent that it had rights to the content it was hosting. “It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content,” Amazon says. For its part, WikiLeaks says Amazon is lying.

Sorry, couldn’t shave down the eight-minute running time, but it’s worth it (boy do I miss the Hulu clip-editing feature). Also, this is NSFW if your workplace isn’t cool with the word “penis.”

If you’re looking for a more sober take on WikiLeaks, check out Andy Greenberg’s excellent Forbes cover story and interview with Julian Assange.

The site cablegate.wikileaks.org, which WikiLeaks is using for the diplomatic documents, is linked to servers run by Amazon Web Services in Seattle, as well as to French company Octopuce. Wikileaks.org, the site’s front page, links back to Amazon servers in the U.S. and in Ireland. Several Internet watchers, including technologist Alex Norcliffe, reported earlier on WikiLeaks’ use of Amazon services.

Amazon and WikiLeaks did not return requests for comment.

The choice of Amazon, a U.S. company, seems strange given the amount of criticism WikiLeaks has received from the U.S. government. Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Sunday saying he supported charging WikiLeaks activist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.

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