Wikileaks:

[Al-khiyal]

U.S. judge orders Wikileaks Web site shut down

February 20, 2008 -- 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 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 "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 White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot of San Mateo, California, 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 Wikileaks.org 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 Web 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 (IP) address (http://88.80.13.160/) — the unique number that specifies a Web site's location on the Internet. Wikileaks also maintained "mirror sites," which are copies of itself, usually to insure against outages and this kind of legal action. These sites were registered in countries like Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (wikileaks.de), and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx) through domain registrars other that 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 sensitive 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 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 February 29.

In a statement on its site, Wikileaks compared Judge White's 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.

"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.

[Bent_Bladi]

i think the original site will be back up though....

[Al-khiyal]

Wikileaks and Internet censorship

February 23rd, 2008 -- Using data from the Global Integrity Index, we put a U.S. court’s recent order to block access to anti-corruption site Wikileaks.org into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn’t work very well.

Starting in 2007, Global Integrity added specific questions about Internet censorship to the Integrity Indicators, which are a set of 304 questions addressing the practice of anti-corruption in national governments. We have always held that a free and critical media is an essential component of good governance; adding an analysis of Internet censorship was an overdue refinement.

We asked two questions:

Are Internet users prevented from reaching political material on the Internet?

Are content creators prevented from posting political material to the Internet?

The results of this work are generally encouraging. In examining a diverse group of 50 countries, a majority earn a full score on both counts. Freedom of speech is a widely held right. Moreover, Internet censorship is difficult and is often ineffective in suppressing political activity. Most governments, aside from targeted libel restrictions, don’t bother regulating online political speech at all.

The many flavors of Internet censorship

A few countries, however, are deeply committed to trying to make censorship work. On this list in 2007 are Algeria, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand. Each has it’s own flavor to the repression of online speech — Internet censorship is still in an experimentation phase, and even the most aggressive approaches don’t seem to work very well.

* Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech.

* China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China is also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters (pictured above) to remind Internet users they are being watched.

* Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it relies on an old-fashioned technique — harassment, beatings and arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled “Cops Without Boundaries” until the government harassed her, “unknown people” beat her father, and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties.

* Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask censorship — rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB (formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat, which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition party sites as well.

* Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect, allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS attack last year.

* Thailand’s military junta moved aggressively to shut down message boards and the formerly-ruling party Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the junta’s censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of tolerance — message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition that they did not “provoke any misunderstandings.” Message received.

So how does the United States fit into this picture? The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

Online censorship: Sounds good, but it never works

While there is much diversity in the style of Internet censorship among the world’s worst offenders, one common thread unites them: Internet censorship doesn’t work. Cut off one site, and a thousand more pop up. In China, censorship online is sparking criticism that off-line censorship has rarely seen.

So Wikileaks.org went offline, but Wikileaks mirror sites hosted overseas hold the same content, and the original site is still up and running from Sweden (http://88.80.13.160) without its easier-to-type URL. As it turns out, shutting down Wikileaks-the-website has focused our attention on Wikileaks-the-idea, which is spreading at the speed of light.

[Al-khiyal]

Major U.S. groups file motion on behalf of Wikileaks users

February 27, 2008 -- The anonymous internet phenomenon Wikileaks.org today won two influential allies in its fight against a US court order shutting down the website.

Wikileaks disclosed secret documents on Guantanamo Bay, Northern Rock and other controversial issues before a Swiss bank won a legal injunction that blocked its US server last week.

But two groups that frequently challenge the Bush administration on its wiretapping programme and its treatment of terrorist suspects came to its defence today. The American civil liberties union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a legal motion on behalf of Wikileaks users, defending their right to access the website without censorship.

"Journalists, academics, and the general public have a legitimate interest in accessing the materials found on Wikileaks in order to inform their work and participate in public debate," ACLU staff attorney Ann Brick said in a statement.

"Blocking access to the entire site in response to a few documents posted there completely disregards the public's right to know. It's unconstitutional and un-American."

In a separate court filing today, an alliance of American reporters filed a motion supporting on behalf of Wikileaks, arguing that the website's closure violates the freedom of speech guaranteed in the Constitution.

The alliance — which includes the Associated Press, Gannett news service, the Los Angeles Times newspaper and other media outlets — cited the famous "Pentagon Papers" case of 1971, when the administration of Richard Nixon sought a restraining order against newspapers that published leaked documents on the Vietnam war.

"Under [the] Pentagon Papers [case], the first amendment prohibits prior restraints [on freedom of speech] in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and the … source is alleged to have obtained the documents unlawfully," the media alliance wrote in its filing.

It was not a risk to US national security that prompted the court order shutting Wikileaks. Instead a Swiss bank convinced a judge appointed by George Bush to close the website after a former bank employee leaked documents that purport to show the company engaged in money laundering and tax evasion.

The next step in the case will come on Friday, when a court hearing is scheduled to determine whether the preliminary shutdown order can stand. In the meantime, fans and supporters of Wikileaks have rallied to its defence by setting up "mirror" copies of the website that include most of the incriminating documents at issue in the case.

[Al-khiyal]

Wikileaks judge may think again

February 29, 2008 -- The Californian district court judge who ordered the closure of the whistleblowers' site Wikileaks will today hear further representations and has indicated that he may backtrack over what free speech groups have called "an overreaching legal attack".

Judge Jeffrey White ordered the immediate closure of the US version of the site two weeks ago, acting on an injunction from the Swiss bank, Julius Baer, which claimed that confidential and potentially damaging documents had been published on the site.

But, outlining new questions on the case in a report last night, White indicated that he had misgivings about the initial decision, asking "what authority stands for the proposition that the right to privacy trumps the freedom of access to information?"

The judge also acknowledged the level of interest in the case by allowing media and several civil liberties groups to attend.

Yesterday, the bank released a statement defending the injunction, which forced the anti-corruption site to close down, reacting to claims that the move was unconstitutional.

"This matter has nothing whatsoever to do with censorship or the First Amendment [of the US constitution]," said the bank.

"Instead, Julius Baer's sole objective has always been limited to the removal of these private and legally protected documents from the website."

The bank claimed the documents released to the site by an ex-employee were protected under consumer banking and privacy laws, and denied that it had requested the removal of any other non-related information that concerned the bank from Wikileaks.

Wikileaks rejected the claim that the bank did not intend its legal action to shut down the site.

"At any time ... Baer could have asked the court that its earlier request on the shutdown order be rescinded. It has not done so," said the site's representatives in a statement.

Today's hearing had originally been held to determine if the injunction against the Wikileaks would be permanent, but will now also explore whether the injunction breached America's first amendment on free speech.

Wikileaks, whose founders have remained anonymous, has put forward its first named representative for the case.

Australian John Shipton and his lawyers have presented briefs from a number of free speech groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, all saying that the case should be thrown out.

Another submission, by Stanford University graduate Daniel Mathews, protests about being named as an officer of Wikileaks when he was only an administrator of the site's Facebook group, not an official representative.

The Wikileaks' Facebook group is administered by four volunteers including the celebrated philosopher and author Noam Chomsky.

[Al-khiyal]

U.S. judge reverses Wikileaks injunction

March 3, 2008 -- Whistleblowing website Wikileaks is back online in the US after an extraordinary about-turn by the judge who closed the site just over two weeks ago.

After a three-hour hearing on Friday, Judge Jeffrey White reversed a previous injunction by the Swiss bank Julius Baer against Wikileaks, which had published documents concerning the bank's offshore accounts.

Judge White had previously ordered the removal of the documents and the permanent deletion of the site wikileaks.org, effectively closing it. Sister sites, including the Belgian-hosted wikileaks.be, remained unaffected.

Backed up in court by a dozen lawyers from free-speech and civil rights groups, Wikileaks representatives heard Judge White acknowledge that the injunction raised serious First Amendment issues.

"There are serious questions about prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment, which the court can make no definitive findings about at this point," said the judge.

"It is clear that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, an injunction restricting speech pending final resolution of the constitutional concerns is impermissible."

His ruling dissolves the injunction against Wikileaks and the site's host, Dynadot.

Wikileaks reinstated its California-hosted site on Friday and also published a host of new documents supplied by Rudolf Elmer, a former employee of the bank.

The site said it would continue to "be a forum for the citizens of the world to disclose issues of social, moral and ethical concern" by "shining that disinfecting sunlight on wrongdoing".

A further hearing on May 16 will determine the final outcome in the case.

[Al-khiyal]

Bank drops lawsuit against Wikileaks

March 6, 2008 -- The Swiss bank pursuing legal action in the US against whistleblowing website Wikileaks has dropped its lawsuit days after a judge reversed a decision to shut down the website for publishing leaked documents.

Julius Baer had been pursuing court action against Wikileaks after the website published documents about the bank's offshore accounts.

In court papers filed yesterday the Swiss bank did not give a reason for dropping its lawsuit and still reserves the right to refile it later.

The decision by Julius Baer to drop the lawsuit comes following a volte face on Friday by US judge Jeffrey White who reversed a previous injunction ordering the closure of Wikileaks.

Last month, judge White ordered the removal from Wikileaks of the documents relating to Julius Baer and the closure of the website.

This came after the bank sued Wikileaks and San Mateo company Dynadot, trying to stop the alleged "unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers".

Dynadot, which provided Wikileaks' domain name in the US, agreed to disable the website in exchange for the bank removing it from the lawsuit.

However, the bank's lawsuit backfired when dozens of lawyers from free speech and civil rights groups rallied to support Wikileaks.

Judge White overturned the previous order after acknowledging that the injunction raised serious issues relating to the US constitution's first amendment, which protects freedom of speech.

Wikileaks reinstated its California-hosted website on Friday and also posted a swathe of new documents supplied by Rudolf Elmer, a former employee of Julius Baer.

The operation's international websites, such as wikileaks.be, were unaffected by the US lawsuit.