Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab.
The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you’re in the United States, right now you’ll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China).
The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information – in large quantities – that governments and corporations don’t want people to know.
This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed back against strongly by everyone who believes in journalism and the right to an informed public, it will have a chilling effect on all media that operates online. Which is to say, almost all media – from the largest corporation to the smallest local forum.
Hat tip: Liz Burbank.
I wouldn’t really consider it confirmed until I had a copy of the court order myself or the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Citizen Media Law Project covered it. But in fine journalistic traditio, I took a look and saw a bunch of other places were covering it, so I ran with it, though I didn’t see that their sources were any more than mine.
Ben,
You’ve got the details correct on this. We put up a post about the injunction around the same time you did. I confirmed the injunction by accessing the court’s electronic docket and uploaded all of the relevant documents to the CMLP’s legal threats database: Julius Baer Bank and Trust v. Wikileaks.
-David
ps: As of 11:00pm EST on February 18, the Wikileaks.org domain is still down, but the organization issued a press release through one of its of mirror sites:
Thanks, David, fantastic reporting! I was coming here to link to your post, glad to see you beat me to that too!
Is there any risk of the initial injunction setting legal precedent if not formally rescinded?
David Ardia now has a fantastic write-up of the status so far. (In short: there appears to be collusion with Julias Baer bank and domain registrar Dynadot – which faces no legal liability – and the federal judge’s ruling is breathtakingly unprecedented prior restrain, he still hasn’t read the First Amendment, but Wikileaks is still accessible from multiple non-US domain names and getting significant media attention.)
I’m glad the tactic is effectively failing in practice, but it needs to be slapped down legally and, if it has any purpose, ICANN, as soon as possible.
As for the actual leaked documents, Wikileaks isn’t even exactly sure what they mean, or which are accurate.
But none of this, Daniel Schmitt writes on behalf of Wikileaks, “should not distract us from the actions of Bank Julius Baer in its attempts to silence its former high-level employee or the role it plays in supporting ultra-rich’s offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding and money laundering.”
And do not forget that in addition to supporting anonymity, Wikileaks is a wiki– built for collaboration and review: Wikileaks would like to encourage everyone out there to have a look at the information. We encourage anyone dealing with tax fraud and evasion and offshore/Swiss banking to review the material posted with us.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a bunch of reporters’ and press freedom groups move to support Wikileaks in its fight against unprecedented Internet censorship.
Here’s another for ya:
http://tinyurl.com/3bm8qh
A sex-cult guru suing a forum for discussing the fact that the public needs to be warned about people like him.