According to a report from the BBC, a US federal court has shut down Wikileaks (it used to be at www.wikileaks.org but you won’t find anything there now), a controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to post corporate and government documents anonymously. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco issued an injunction ordering Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, to remove all traces of Wikileaks from its servers. The court also ordered that Dynadot should prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website and demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name" be handed over.
However, the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium, India and Germany. The order came because Swiss banking group Julius Baer filed a lawsuit after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Some of those documents allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
UPDATE:
Legal Blog Watch also posted on this story today; the posting points to an excellent writeup at the Citizen Media Law Project that in turn mentions a press release from Wikileaks responding to the injunction which states that "The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction. Wikileaks will keep on publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."
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