[AfrICANN-discuss] Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks --- This is pretty interesting!

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

February 20, 2008
 Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks
By ADAM LIPTAK and BRAD STONE

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20wiki.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

In a move that legal experts said could present a major test of First
Amendment rights in the Internet era, a federal judge in San Francisco
on Friday ordered the disabling of a Web site devoted to disclosing
confidential information.

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 said to show the rules of
engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual for the
operation of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other
evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius
Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said 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. According to Wikileaks,
"the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures
used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion."

On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San
Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site's
domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name. The
order had the effect of locking the front door to the site — a largely
ineffectual action that kept back doors to the site, and several
copies of it, available to sophisticated Web users who knew where to
look.

Domain registrars like Dynadot, Register.com and GoDaddy .com provide
domain names — the Web addresses users type into browsers — to Web
site operators for a monthly fee. Judge White ordered Dynadot to
disable the Wikileaks.org address and "lock" it to prevent the
organization from transferring the name to another registrar.

The feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge,
did not understand how the domain system works, or how quickly Web
communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free
speech online.

The site itself could still be accessed at its Internet Protocol
address (http://88.80.13.160/) — the unique number that specifies a
Web site's location on the Internet. Wikileaks also maintained "mirror
sites," or copies usually produced to ensure against failures and this
kind of legal action. Some sites were registered in Belgium
(http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the
Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx) through domain registrars
other than Dynadot, and so were not affected by the injunction.

Fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize those alternate
addresses this week. They have also distributed copies of the bank
information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing
networks.

In a separate order, also issued on Friday, Judge White ordered
Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents. The second order,
which the judge called an amended temporary restraining order, did not
refer to the permanent injunction but may have been an effort to
narrow it.

Lawyers for the bank and Dynadot did not respond to requests for
comment. Judge White has scheduled a hearing in the case for Feb. 29.

In a statement on its site, Wikileaks compared Judge White's orders to
ones eventually overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the
Pentagon Papers case in 1971. In that case, the federal government
sought to enjoin publication by The New York Times and The Washington
Post of a secret history of the Vietnam War.

"The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing The Times's
printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press
power," the site said, referring to the order that sought to disable
the entire site.

The site said it was founded by dissidents in China and journalists,
mathematicians and computer specialists in the United States, Taiwan,
Europe, Australia and South Africa. Its goal, it said, is to develop
"an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and
analysis."

Judge White's order disabling the entire site "is clearly not
constitutional," said David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media
Law Project at Harvard Law School. "There is no justification under
the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site."

The narrower order, forbidding the dissemination of the disputed
documents, is a more classic prior restraint on publication. Such
orders are disfavored under the First Amendment and almost never
survive appellate scrutiny.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company