In December 2010, when Amazon booted Wikileaks off of AWS (Amazon Web Services) without any clear or credible explanation, I decided to look into whether their decision was mainly technical or political. At the time, Amazon’s dominance over the book trade was becoming a cause for serious concern — and their acquisition of a print-on-demand service, which they rebranded as Createspace and folded into their Kindle operations (then just a few years old), added fuel to the fire. Amazon met these concerns with broad claims that its various operations operated independently of each other, so — in theory — whatever AWS “policy” justified cutting off Wikileaks should not be a factor for Createspace. To test that, I created a book that purported to contain Wikileaks’s so-called “Cablegate” leaks. I used the open-source application Image Magick to generate hundreds of pages of random pixels, a bit like full-page QR Codes, and uploaded them along with all the relevant materials for a book — a cover, a blurb, and so on. The blurb was carefully worded to invite that interpretation without engaging in false advertising:
On Sunday 28th November 2010, WikiLeaks begin publishing, 251,287 leaked United States Embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. Volume 1 of Cablegate: The Complete WikiLeaks Datadump, offers an abstract, high-level view of these communications in 200 densely packed pages. Due to the immense volume of material it was necessary to rely on extremely efficient encoding techniques with a consequent loss of resolution; as a result, we cannot guarantee that all of the material is legible.
Createspace printed several initial proof copies without problem, and I ordered more to be sure. But I then promoted the book on “anonops,” an IRC channel closely associated with the “hacktivist” movement Anonymous, whose increasingly ambitious activities were becoming a thorn in the side of powerful entities like the MPAA, the RIAA, and law firms associated with aggressive intellectual-property rights enforcement. And, indeed, Createspace quickly informed me that they wouldn’t be able to produce the book. At first they claimed that it presented technical problems for their workflow because “the interior content…contains blank black and white pages” (most books do). When I challenged that, they then argued that
I was “welcome to fade the static images on each page and indicate on each page that you are displaying encrypted text and that it is a gag book,” and/or “add a disclaimer page at the beginning of the book that this is a gag book.” When I said no, the book is quite serious, they said I had to “indicate in text that you are displaying encrypted text and to indicate in both the interior and book description that it is a gag book.”
My account at the time is here. To this day, Amazon lists the book as “Out of Print — Limited Availability.”