Judge Attempts to Censor Entire Website and Fails
The Internet has done far more than make information instantly available and provide virtually free 24-hour entertainment; it is also changing the legal landscape in many countries, including the United States.
Recently a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco has raised some eyebrows. The judge ordered that a website that regularly publishes confidential information be shut down. Legal experts watching the case say that this case could set precedents regarding First Amendment rights in the age of the Internet.
The website, Wikileaks.org, allows and encourages visitors to post leaked confidential documents and information in order to discourage "unethical behavior" by government entities and corporations. The International Herald Tribune reports that the website has revealed documents regarding 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 its users consider to be corporate waste and wrongdoing.
A bank in the Cayman Islands filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that one of their former employees had provided stolen confidential documents to Wikileaks.org. They claimed that this disgruntled employee violated banking laws and a confidentiality agreement by releasing the documents and having them posted on the Internet. The bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust, described the former employee's actions as "a harassment and terror campaign."
According to the information about Julius Baer Bank and Trust on Wikileaks.org, the bank has set up secret trust structures in order to conceal assets, hide money and evade taxes. So it is understandable that the bank wanted that information removed from the Internet in short order, thus the filing of the lawsuit.
Judge Jeffrey White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco sided with Julius Baer Bank and Trust about the removal of the sensitive documents from the website. The judge was advised that the domain name for the website was registered through Dynadot of San Mateo, California and likely vaguely informed of how domain registrars enable websites to work. He therefore granted the bank a permanent injunction and ordered Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name and to lock it so that it could not be transferred to a different registrar.
Dynadot apparently complied with the judge's order, however that was not the end of the website. By ordering the domain name to be disabled, the judge simply prevented users from being able to type in the domain name to access the site. The website is actually still live and can be accessed through the IP address or through mirror sites that the operators had set up to protect the website from outages. Because the judge did not order that the web servers that host the actual content of Wikileaks take the content offline, the website is still largely operable.
The judge did issue a second order in the case that directed the owners of Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank's confidential documents.
Legal experts say that the judge's order which attempted to shut down the entire Wikileaks website was unconstitutional and has no basis under the First Amendment.
One thing is for certain: We have not heard the last of this. Since the website is still online, there is likely to be further action in an attempt to wipe it off the Internet. And since the owners and fans of Wikileaks feel so strongly about their First Amendment rights and the "service" they are providing to the public, this is likely to be a long battle.
