Current Event: Wikileaks — a source of private and leaked information
On Februrary 19, 2008, the Wikileaks domain name was shut down as a result of a lawsuit filed by a group of Swiss bankers. Wikileaks is a website where people can confidentially and anonymously post sensitive, often leaked, information. The Swiss bankers, representing Bank Julius Baer & Co., claimed that Wikileaks “had displayed confidential, personally identifiable account information of its customers, as a result of possibly criminal actions by a former employee.” Wikileaks is hosted by Dynadot in San Mateo, California, and California judges “pulled the plug” on the Wikileaks domain in response to the lawsuits. On February 29th, Wikileaks was given its domain name back, due largely to several free speech groups (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who provided legal support for Wikileaks. Wikileaks is currently up and running on its primary domain name <http://wikileaks.org/>.
Information on Wikileaks includes an operations manual from the Guantanamo detentions camp and President Moi’s looting of Kenya. As a means of circumventing several country’s firewalls (such as the great Firewall of China), several Wikileaks covernames are provided, and Wikileaks also provides an encrypted https://secure.wikileaks.org/ to ensure the confidentiality of its submitters.
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Comment by diademed
March 2, 2008 @ 11:56 pm
It is rather surprising how swiftly the justice department reacted in this case in essentially dissolving the company’s public facing presence (or trying to at the least) on baseless accusations. It seems more and more that we hear stories of outright fraudulent acts being committed in response to public disclosure, or the acts of a smaller party against a larger one.
Whether they think they can ‘get away with it’ or just hide the real evidence under the rug, even as decisions that were obviously incorrect in hindsight are reversed, it should be asked just why are these judgements being handed out in the first place? The judge in this case stated that he stood by his earlier ruling in part because Wikileaks was a no-show at the initial ruling.
As these cases move to a multinational standpoint (the domain registrant lives in Australia), it is beginning to seem like our previous systems begin to decay. It is no more reasonable to expect a foreign citizen to fly to California on a few days notice than it is for the judge to fly to Australia.
Comment by Apostille Services
December 17, 2008 @ 11:39 am
I think that they figure people will just forget about it and not react. They probably think that it’s just one website and no one will react.