http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/opinion/21thu3.html?ref=opinion
| Quote: |
Published: February 21, 2008
The rise of Internet journalism has opened a new front in the battle to protect free speech. A federal judge last week ordered the disabling of Wikileaks.org, a muckraking Web site. That stifles important speech and violates the First Amendment. It should be reversed, and Wikileaks should be allowed to resume operations.
Wikileaks claims to have posted more than a million corporate and government documents that, it says, expose wrongdoing. It has posted, among other things, a 2003 operations manual from the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military prison. Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Cayman Islands branch of a Swiss bank, sued Wikileaks charging that it had illegally posted documents stolen by a former employee. The site said the documents "allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures" for money laundering, tax evasion and other misdeeds.
Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White ordered Wikileaks's domain name registrar to disable its Web address. That was akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article. The First Amendment requires the government to act only in the most dire circumstances when it regulates free expression.
In a second order, the judge directed Wikileaks not to distribute the bank documents. That was a "prior restraint" on speech, something the courts almost always find violates the First Amendment. If the employee did not have a right to the documents and the bank was injured as a result, a suit against the leaker for monetary damages should be sufficient.
Much of the law governing the Internet remains unsettled. Still, the free speech burdens of closing down a journalistic Web site are just as serious as closing down a print publication, and courts should tread carefully.
For now, the lawsuit appears to have backfired, bringing worldwide publicity to the documents. Enterprising Internet users have found ways to get to the site. We hope it will also educate judges and the public about the importance of giving full protection to online speech. |
wikileaks.org .. is blocked.. check out wikileaks.be (new domain)
edit by rvec: please use quote tags It is not technically prior restraint. Prior restraint is telling a newspaper they cannot publish an original article before publication. The court ordered wikileaks to stop distributing the documents based on the fact that it is stolen goods.
This site is host to more copyright infringement than your average college students computer. This opens them up to private suits. The MPAA, and RIAA have the power to shut websites down, so this is really nothing new. They'll just host the servers in Guatemala and get the domain back within a month.
In the future use the quote button for any words that are not your own, even if you source it.
Thanks for the useful information. It seems that the site is still available at many domains. The original is at http://88.80.13.160/. The server is in Sweden and is unaffected by the court order, except that wikileaks.org no longer resolves to the ip. It is mirrored at several other domains, both with and without SSL.
A description of the order shutting down the site is at:
https://88.80.13.160/wiki/Swiss_bank_obtains_injunction_against_whistleblower_site
or, of course, at the .be or other mirrors. It appears that this action was based on disclosure of sensitive financial claims, not primarily about copyright issues.
| Quote: |
The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.
The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former vice president of its Cayman Island's offshoring operation, Rudolf Elmer.
Initial research easily turned up that 2002/03 some sensitive documents had slipped out of the Swiss banks office in the Cayman Islands, apparently reaching US tax investigation units.
They were eventually sent to the Swiss financial magazine CASH, which reported on the disclosure, but possibly due to an injunction or Swiss banking law, not the details.
When the leak of trust structures was discovered in 2003, Bank Julius Baer initiated legal investigations on the Caymans, involving the search of the home of each employee and when not gaining any insights from that, undertaking a lie detector test on the employees.
It still remained unclear where the data went. The group of people having legitimate access to these documents was small.
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So much for free speech... they must have really struck a chord with someone high up to have someone throw the book at them, good on them...
I'm sure we're not getting the whole story obviously. Although I hold liberty very closely, if the documents posted on the website are stolen or subject to copyright infringement, they have no right to post them. They are committing a crime punishable by law if that's the case. Now that's probably just a stupid ruling the courts made up just so they could protect themselves, but we don't really know.
I think the judge who gave the ruling has reversed his decision.
The site is up and running again. I just visited it and it loads up fine.
The link is:
www.wikileaks.org I wonder where the heck are they going to register their domains now, considering that anyone with dirty enough undies will try to play that same card.
| PMK-Bear wrote: |
| I wonder where the heck are they going to register their domains now, considering that anyone with dirty enough undies will try to play that same card. |
They already have a bunch of domains, and I doubt if anyone will try the same game again, because its so obvious it won't work and will only cause more people to learn about the site. In this particular legal action, the court order was only valid in the United States. It did not affect the actual site because it was hosted elsewhere. It only affected visitors who were stopped by not finding the name. If I had gotten an error on that name, I would have looked up "wikileaks" in google which would have given me the other url's. If that had failed, I would have gone to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and found a historical version of the page. In the latter case, I wouldn't have been able to find recent content, but I could have found their list of backup sites.
Fortunately, if there is a legitimate reason for shutting down a site, which is generally recognized by most countries, then they can be stopped. If Wikileaks got careless about posting material that violates privacy rights or is published and copyrighted, they would eventually become hard to find. As long as the material is unpublished and clearly not intended to be published, it would be hard to make a strong legal case against them.
