[Infowarrior] - Web Site That Posts Leaked Material Ordered Shut

[Richard Forno]

February 19, 2008
Web Site That Posts Leaked Material Ordered Shut
By ADAM LIPTAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/19cnd-wiki.html

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 ³unethical behavior² by corporations and governments.
It has posted documents concerning 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 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 claimed that ³a disgruntled
ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign² provided
stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement
and banking laws. According to Wikileaks, ³the documents allegedly reveal
secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering
and tax evasion.²

On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Federal District Court in San
Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site¹s domain
name registrar and Web host, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name. That
has the effect of making the site invisible to people looking for it by
name. But the site itself remains available through its internet protocol
address, as do ancillary sites run by Wikileaks in other countries, along
with mirror sites run by third parties.

In a separate order, also issued on Friday, Judge White ordered Dynadot and
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 attempt 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 White¹s orders to ones
eventually overturned by the Unites States Supreme Court in the Pentagon
Papers case in 1971. In that case, the federal government sought to enjoin
publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War by The New York Times and
The Washington Post.

³The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing The Times¹s printers
to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power,² 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 ³an
uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis.²

Judge White¹s order disabling the entire site ³is clearly not
constitutional,² said David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law
Project at Harvard Law School. ³There is no justification under the First
Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site.²

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.