WikiLeaks has had the fortune of several domain owners who have provided mirrors of the original site to keep the information available on the Internet in the case the site should go down for any reason. Unfortunately, the Electronic Freedom Foundation is reporting that one of those domain owners has run into an issue with his hosting provider, which is forcing him to take his mirror down due to a “terms of service violation of the acceptable use policy”.
The man who was hosting the mirror, Mark McCoy, posted the message exchange with his hosting provider on his blog last week.
McCoy explains that shortly after signing up to be a WikiLeaks mirror, he was contacted by the hosting provider, siteground.com, by an email with the subject line Illegal activity through your website detected.
“SiteGround has received a complaint from its upstream provider – SoftLayer, that some illegal activity has been performed through your website,” the email states. “Due to the fact that this activity severely violates SiteGround’s Terms of Use and Acceptable Use Policy, we were forced to suspend your account in order to prevent any further issues caused by the illegal activity.” There was also a long list of steps that McCoy had to perform in order to have his account reactivated.
When pressed for an explanation, a representative at SiteGround explained that it appeared that McCoy’s account had been hacked and there had been “infringing materials” uploaded to his website.
McCoy, who seems to be an advanced user of computers, fired back: “Our systems were not compromised and the account was not hacked. Therefore, if this is a reaction to information related to Wikileaks, please tell me where the violation can be found in the TOS or AUP so I can take appropriate action with this admin.”
After going in circles with both the support and abuse departments while attempting to figure out exactly what the alleged TOS and AUP violations were, McCoy escalated his inquiries to SoftLayer.
“Siteground has indicated that the files may be placed back on the site, but any further complaints will result in a permanent suspension of my hosting services. This would indicate an unwritten and capricious policy subject to the whim of anyone who may take exception to certain material,” McCoy wrote. “This began as an accusation that my system was compromised or otherwise infected with malware or virus’. Since that is not the case, and most likely a ruse to gain my compliance, I am directing my inquiry to you, since it is Softlayer that is making these allegations towards Siteground in attempts to suspend my account or force removal of what I now believe is material that is not illegal, but personally objectionable to someone with your company.”
After that message and further discussions, SiteGround eventually admitted that it was the threat of a possible future DDoS attack that constituted the TOS/AUP violation.
“This incident shows that censorship is a slippery slope,” EFF representative Marci Hoffman explains. “The first victim here was Wikileaks. Now it's a Wikileaks mirror. Will a news organization that posts cables and provides journalistic analysis be next? Or a blogger who posts links to news articles describing the cables? If intermediaries are willing to use the potential for future DDOS attacks as a reason to cut off users, they can cut off anyone for anything.”
Indeed, I’ve never heard of a company using the possibility of a future TOS violation as grounds for the suspension or termination of an account. It appears that we can add SiteGround and SoftLayer to our list of corporations who are working to keep WikiLeaks down.
