Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, yesterday succeeded in getting Amazon.com to boot Wikileaks off its servers.
Now, Lieberman says he’s widening his scope.
“We’ve gotta put pressure on any companies — like Amazon, [which] just cut Wikileaks off from its servers to distribute — there’s a company now in Sweden, I think it’s called Bahnhof, which is providing that kind of access to the Internet to Wikileaks,” he said on MSNBC this afternoon. “We’ve got to stop them from doing that.”
As TPM reported yesterday, Lieberman’s committee staff called Amazon and asked, “Are there plans to take the site down?”
Amazon responded by removing the site, telling the committee it violated unspecified terms of use.
TPM yesterday asked a committee spokeswoman, Leslie Phillips, whether Lieberman was planning to reach out to other companies.
“The committee is not reaching out to other companies,” she said. “Senator Lieberman hopes that the Amazon case will send the message to other companies that might host Wikileaks that it would be irresponsible to host the site.”
Phillips said that hasn’t changed, and that Lieberman has no specific plans as of now to speak with other companies, including the Swedish firm Bahnhof AB where Wikileaks is now reportedly residing.
But his pressure on Amazon is already having a wider effect. The New York Times reported this afternoon that a Seattle-based company called Tableau had deleted charts and graphs uploaded by Wikileaks.
Tableau explains on its web site:
Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.
The company also said Wikileaks violated the site’s terms of use by uploading content it doesn’t have the rights to.
Watch the video of Lieberman on MSNBC:
