Wikileaks Pushed Off Amazon's Servers

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- WikiLeaks has been forced to move its site off servers owned by Amazon.com(AMZN), according to the whistleblower Web site's Twitter feed.

"WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free--fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe," reads a message on the site's feed.

In a separate message later it adds: "If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books."

The Associated Press reported that Amazon.com, which rents out use of its servers, had removed WikiLeaks from its servers after being questioned by "congressional staff" about its connection to the site, whose founder Julian Assange is being sought by Interpol for questioning about a rape charge in Sweden that he has publicly denied.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, put up a statement on his Web site Wednesday about the situation, saying: "The company's [Amazon.com] decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material."

Lieberman is the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and he said the committee's staff had contacted Amazon.com on Tuesday seeking an explanation for why it was hosting the Wikileaks site. The company then informed him on Wednesday morning that it has ceased to host Wikileaks, and while Lieberman was happy with the decision, he made it clear he doesn't plan to let things end there.

"I will be asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with Wikileaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information," Lieberman said.

Wikileaks released more than 250,000 sensitive government documents related to U.S. foreign relations earlier this week, and Assange said in an interview that the site was planning another so-called megaleak involving a U.S. bank in early 2011.

The site has repeatedly been knocked down by hackers employing DDOS [distributed denial of service] attacks, according to Wikileaks tweets.

--Written by Michael Baron in New York.