The New Freedom

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What do China, Thailand and the United States all have in common? Government imposed censorship of the whiste-blower/investigative journalism website, Wikileaks.

The creation of Wikileaks was one of the first things I ever wrote about on this site, and since its creation just over a year ago it has been incredibly successful in exposing corruption and promoting transparency.

Now, a US District Judge has ordered that Wikileaks’ DNS company Dynadot

shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court

because of a lawsuit brought forth by a Cayman bank.

This is the explanation of the case in Wikileaks’ press release:

The order was written by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President the Cayman Island’s operation, Rudolf Elmer. Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several countries, the order was served on the intermediary Wikileaks purchased the ‘Wikileaks.org’ name through — California registrar Dynadot, who then used its access to the internet website name registration system to delete the records for ‘Wikileaks.org’. The order also enjoins every person who has heard about the order from from even linking to the documents.

Those documents are here.

Wikileaks’ legal team were not represented in the hearing, in fact, the one member of their legal staff who was attending in a personal capacity was asked to leave the courtroom.

The District Judge who signed the order (available on mirror here) i s a Bush appointed judge named Jeffrey S. White.He operates out on Courtroom 2 and floor 17 of a building in San Fransisco. If you’d like to try to chat with him, the telephone number for the building is 415-522-2000.

If you try to go to Wikileaks.org now, you will now get a server not found error. However, the site can still be accessed directly by the IP address, 88.80.13.160. There are also a number of mirrors, such as wikileaks.cx which were set up after censorship cases in other countries.

Their official press release is located here. In it, they make a comparison the the 1971 case of the Pentagon Papers:

To find an injunction similar to the Cayman’s case, we need to go back to Monday June 15, 1971 when the New York Times published excepts of of Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked “Pentagon Papers” and found itself enjoined the following day. The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing the Times’ printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power. The supreme court found the Times censorship injunction unconstitutional in a 6-3 decision.

They do not mention their next course of action, but I assume that their pro-bono legal team will be appealing the injunction.

The EFF have not made a comment about this yet, so I am writing to them and asking for one. This is a doubly significant case as it is not only a case of American internet censorship, but of the freedom of the press as well.

I would also like to call for a boycott of the registrar Dynadot for immediately complying with this unconstitutional censorship.

More as this develops.
Rich

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