Whistleblower Website Taken Offline in U.S. By California Court Ruling
By Aaron Poehler
Published on February 19, 2008
The order follows a case brought by Switzerland-based Julius Baer Bank and Trust over documents that purport to provide evidence that the bank’s Cayman Islands division assisted its customers in laundering funds and hiding assets for purposes of tax evasion.
After Wikileaks declined to remove the documents, Baer Bank filed a restraining order against the site and its domain name registrar, Dynadot. Though Wikileaks was not represented at the hearing, Judge Jeffery White issued a permanent injunction on Monday requiring that the wikileaks.org domain name be disabled and locked to prevent transfer to another host. In a statement, Wikileaks asserted that the order exceeds the court’s authority and violates U.S. free speech protections.
The website, which is believed to have been founded in part by Chinese dissidents, has previously faced censorship issues related to Chinese government attempts to block the site from being accessed within that country. As a result, Wikileaks maintains a number of mirror sites based in various locales, including wikileaks.be, wikileaks.cx, and wikileaks.de, each of which duplicates the wikileaks.org content.
Judge White's injunction does not affect any of the mirror sites, which remain accessible within the U.S.; the main site also remains accessible via its numeric IP address http://88.80.13.160/.
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