Whistle-blower site taken offline - International Mass Media

Whistle-blower site taken offline
by staff report BBC via reed - BBC News Monday, Feb 18 2008, 10:22am
international / mass media / other press

an exercise in 'democracy'

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should "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."

Other orders included that the domain name be locked "to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar" to prevent changes being made to the site.

Wikileaks claimed that the order was "unconstitutional" and said that the site had been "forcibly censored".

Web names

The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank's Cayman Island's operation.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of "pending legal proceedings".

The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland.

The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening.

Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was "given only hours notice" via e-mail.

A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account".

The order also demanded that details of the site's registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person...who accessed the account for the domain name" to be handed over.

Wikileaks allows users to post documents anonymously.

Information bank

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.

It recently made available a confidential briefing document relating to the collapse of the UK's Northern Rock bank.

Lawyers working on behalf of the bank attempted to have the documents removed from the site. They can still be accessed.

Dynadot was contacted for this article but have so far not responded to requests for comment.

Published: 2008/02/18 16:20:16 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

An international website that claims to blow the whistle on corporate and governmental fraud vowed yesterday to defy attempts by a US court to close it down. Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to anonymously post documents in an attempt to expose corruption and wrongdoing. Its owners said yesterday that a Californian judge had ordered that the site be taken offline last week, after an injunction from a Swiss bank.

The bank, Julius Baer, sought the injunction to prevent claims being posted online that it was involved in money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. It has indicated that the information was prejudicial to an ongoing court case.

Last night, the version of the site hosted in the US remained unavailable, but duplicate sites hosted in India and Belgium were still accessible.

Information on the Wikileaks site led to a front-page Guardian story in August 2007, exposing money laundering in Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi, and in November the site published a confidential briefing memo from Northern Rock that was picked up by the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC.

The site published hundreds of pages of information from a former bank employee about the offshore activity of Julius Baer. Several documents allegedly relate to money laundering claims. The bank could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Last week a Californian district court judge, Jeffrey White, accepted the bank's injunction without amendment and also ordered Dynadot, the site's domain registry, to delete all record of the address from the central internet domain registry. Wikileaks' founders said the US court's move breached the first amendment.

© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited

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