Swiss Bank Gets Court to Block US Access to Wikileaks.org
Feb 18th, 2008 by John Stodder
If you’re in the US, you can no longer look at wikileaks.org, the wiki site where whistleblowers could post leaked documents, after a California court ruled in favor of a Swiss bank accused of money-laundering. The court ruled in spite of the fact that Wikileaks did not attend the hearing due to late notice.
The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.
It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net with many commentators questioning the motives of the people behind the site.
The bank, the Julius Baer group, was concerned about documents posted by Rudolf Elmer, an ex-VP of its Cayman Island operations. The documents were said to have an adverse effect on the bank’s position in an upcoming trial in Switzerland.
So how did a California court get involved in this? And why take down a site hosting more than a million documents over a relative handful of pages? That’s what a blogger at Techdirt.com wants to know.
All of that seems rather excessive, and of questionable legality. After all, doesn’t Section 230 of the CDA provide safe harbor for the service provider? I could see an order demanding the specific documents be taken down, but the rest of the order seems to go well beyond what’s both reasonable and standard in cases of this nature.
The court also ordered Wikileaks to surrender all IP addresses of those who accessed their site. Privacy is dead, indeed.
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