A Court Orders Disabling of Whistleblower Site Wikileaks

by Damozel | According to The New York Times, a federal judge has ordered the disabling of "Wikileaks." (NYT)

The site, Wikileaks.org, invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents concerning the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual concerning the operation of prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.(NYT)

The suit that led to the injunction was brought by a Cayman Islands Bank which is alleging that "“a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign” provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws."(NYT) But ""[a]ccording to Wikileaks, “the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.”"(NYT)    

Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction requiring the site's domain name regsistrar, to disable the domain name.  The New York Times points out that this action will not prevent sophisticated users from accessing the domain. (NYT)  The order didn't affect the site's IP address (where it can still be reached; see the New York Times) and various mirror sites in Belgium, Germany, and the Christmas Islands. (NYT)   

IThe Director of the Citizens Media Law Project at Harvard Law School says that for the judge to shut down the site was clearly unconstitutional. (NYT)

According to Kim Zetter at Threat Level:

  Julie Turner, an attorney in California who represented Wikileaks prior to this latest litigation but is not counsel for the group on this matter, is surprised that the court sanctioned such a broad agreement.  "It’s like saying that Time magazine published one page of sensitive material so (someone can) seize the entire magazine and put a lock on their presses," she says....

Turner says that rather than trying to censor the information, the bank could have simply responded to the claims on the Wikileaks site. She also chastised the bank for not having better security over its documents.

"If you're dealing with banking records . . . if your bread and butter is confidentiality in banking, then you’d really better have mechanisms by which you can control documents. The bank itself should have had better security mechanisms rather than allowing employees to take electronic copies of things or make copies of things and remove them. That’s not Wikileaks' fault."  (Threat Level)

Laura McGann at The Washington Independent says:

What Judge Jeffrey S. White’s decision does do is raise an important legal question. As NY Times’ Adam Liptak points out right off the bat, this case is a "major test of First Amendment rights in the Internet era."  Liptak reports that court orders restricting the desemination of specific pieces of information "are disfavored under the First Amendment and almost never survive appellate scrutiny." Nevermind shutting down an ENTIRE site. Way to err on the side of caution, Judge White.  (The Washington Independent)

Blogger reactions?

Carl at The Reaction:

Little noticed in the United States, at least in the mainstream media, a ruling was handed down yesterday in California that could conceivably alter the entire make up for the Net:....[B]ecause of a potential tax evasion claim, the freedom of information that is the hallmark of the Internet, the illusion of full disclosure, has to take a hit?

The taming of the Internet has begun in earnest. (A Troubling Ruling)

At Comments from Left Field, Kyle E. Moore writes:

When I first heard of Wikileaks late last year, I was in general pretty skeptical. I of course applaud any and all methods of leaking documents that could unearth unethical and illegal behavior from both corporations and our government, but at the same time I worried about the veracity of the sources, and was wary of the vetting processes that would be available for such a site.

But apparently there was something good going on at Wikileaks… good enough to get the site shut down by a Judge in San Francisco....

Here’s the funny thing.  The bit of information that [the bank which brought the suit] didn’t want let out; “asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion”… oh my.  (Protecting the Crooks)

Discourse.net:

One order requires an ISP, Dynadot, to take down all DNS records pertaining to the wikileaks.org site.....I presume Dynadot was their registrar as this had the effect of making the wikileaks.org domain inoperative.... This isn’t a classic prior restraint on speech since it reaches the registrar not the speaker — but it’s close enough to stopping the delivery trucks on a newspaper that I think this aspect of the decision is a cause for some First Amendment concern.....

The second order is a much broader gag order [corrected link] that enjoins everyone sued by the plaintiffs — wikileaks, everyone connected by the parties, ten John Does, their ISP, lawyers, and anyone working “in concert” with them, and “all others who receive notice of this order” (!)....Leaving aside the sweep of the order — on what theory does this court have jurisdiction of everyone who learns of the order? — this seems like a classic prior restraint and is thus presumptively unconstitutional.  (Discourse.net)

Comments

[Lara]

I guess the courts don't remember that ruling that people who have information about insurance fraud (particularly Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Medicare) are encouraged to submit their "leakies" and are even paid if their "leakies" are validated!