Wikileaks whistleblower site shut down in the U.S.
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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Continue readingJudicial Misconduct in State and Federal Courts
For the federal judiciary, Congress has created a procedure that permits any person to file a complaint in the courts about the behavior of federal judges in every federal jurisdiction, according to the Courts website.
In the states, each state has a process for dealing with complaints about judges' conduct: independent judicial-conduct commissions have been established by state constitution in 28 states, by statute in 15 states and the District of Columbia and by court rule in seven more, according to the American Judicature Society (AJS). The AJS website is a good place to find information about how states deal with judicial misconduct including a list of the organizations from each state established to investigate allegations of misconduct by state court judges; the composition of state judicial conduct commissions; and at what point confidentiality ceases in judicial discipline proceedings in the different states. AJS also provides information about federal judicial misconduct.
FBI Documents To The 9/11 Commission Released by INTELWIRE
INTELWIRE has announced that they've obtained more than 1,700 pages of FBI documents that are cited in the endnotes of the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission. The documents were obtained by Intelwire under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents reveal many new details about the hijacker's movements, possible links between the hijackers and the government of Saudi Arabia, and connections to extremist figures in the United States, including blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. There is a wide variety of information, including the movements of the hijackers over more than 10 years, people who associated with the hijackers in the U.S., FBI interviews with the victims, transcripts of phone calls to the hijacked flights, intelligence obtained by overseas agencies. The documents are listed on the Intelwire website according to the chapter of the 9/11 Report in which they appeared. According to Intelwire, this may be the largest online repository of 9/11 source documents on the Web. Over the next several months these documents will also be posted individually and chronologically at INTELFILES.com with descriptive text, and additional comment and analysis as appropriate. Please note that the documents have been heavily redacted. A chronologically ordered package is available to researchers, including multiple copies of documents with different redactions.
Continue readingHappy Washington’s Birthday, President’s Day, etc.
I'm sitting at my desk at work because today is not a holiday at the University of Pittsburgh. Why not? I remember when I was a small child in Pennsylvania we had no school on Feb. 12, Lincoln's birthday, or Feb. 22, Washington's birthday. Somehow in the 20-odd years during which I didn't live in Pennsylvania that changed.
Here's the scoop on today's holiday. It is a national holiday called "Washington's Birthday" as spelled out in federal law at 5 U.S.C. § 6103(a) . But this holiday status applies only to employees of the federal government - executive departments, independent agencies, and Government corporations, including their field services. Washington's Birthday (Feb. 22) has been a national holiday since 1879 but in 1971 it moved to the third Monday in February instead of Feb. 22.
In my state of Pennsylvania, today is also a state holiday called "Presidents' Day" as spelled out in Pennsylvania state law 44 P.S. § 11 . Both Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays were once state holidays, but in 1968 the Washington's Birthday holiday was moved to the third Monday in February instead of Feb. 22, and in 1978 the Lincoln's Birthday holiday was eliminated. And again, this only applies to state government employees and banks. For the rest of us, employee manuals tell us that companies generally balance internal work requirements and employee morale against federal and state holiday schedules and the prevailing practices among other local employers.
There is an entertaining and informative article on the National Archives website that gives a detailed history of today's holiday.
Global Warming Debate online
The founder of the highly respected Arts & Letters Daily Web site has created a new site Climate Debate Daily - a forum for both sides in the "heated" controversy over global warming. The site's dual format sheds a scholarly light on this heavily politicized battle. According to the website, Climate Debate Daily is intended to deepen our understanding of disputes over climate change and the human contribution to it. The site links to scientific articles, news stories, economic studies, polemics, historical articles, PR releases, editorials, feature commentaries, and blog entries. It includes arguments and evidence generally in support of the IPCC position on the reality of signficant anthropogenic global warming - and also includes material skeptical of the IPCC position and the notion that anthropogenic global warming represents a genuine threat to humanity. As a matter of editorial policy, Climate Debate Daily "maintains a studied neutrality", allowing each side to present its most powerful and persuasive case. The goal is to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information. The issue of climate change will remain important because it is affecting government policies on a variety of issues worldwide.
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