Swiss bank Julius Baer may soon wish it hadn't meddled with Wikileaks.org. The bank's steps to get a judge to remove sensitive content about its offshore activities from the whistle-blower Web site has turned into a public-relations nightmare as civil-liberties groups join to defend Wikileaks.
Wikileaks.org allowed anonymous posting of documents, including those disclosing U.S. Army operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; human-rights abuses in China; and political corruption  in Kenya. But when documents from the Swiss bank showed up, that marked the beginning of a new look at First Amendment law.
The bank filed a legal complaint and after an initial review, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ordered Dynadot, a California Web-hosting company, to "immediately clear and remove" records from Wikileaks and "prevent the domain name from resolving to the Wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank page" until he could undertake a closer review.
An Unintended Effect
Free-speech and privacy advocates are up in arms over the takedown, which was largely ineffective because versions of the site hosted throughout the world remained online and even the Wikileaks site itself is still available at its numerical address, http://88.80.13.160.
Now the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a motion to intervene in the case. The motion is on behalf of organizations and individuals that have accessed and used documents on Wikileaks.org and want to continue to do so.
"The court's order shuts down and locks up the domain name Wikileaks.org permanently, effectively interfering with the public's ability to access the materials on the Web site as easily as possible," said Aden Fine, senior staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. "The public has a right to receive information and ideas, especially ones concerning the public interest. This injunction ignores that vital First Amendment principle."
While the site can still be accessed, the ACLU and others argue that the injunction blocks access to all content accessed through the domain name Wikileaks.org, even though the overwhelming majority of documents are unrelated to the bank's complaint and concern matters of public interest.
"The Supreme Court has warned against 'burning down the house to roast the pig,'" said Steve Mayer, a partner with Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin who is working on the case. "But that is what has happened in this case, with the result that our clients, and others like them, are being denied their right to receive ideas and information. Without that right, freedom suffers." (continued...)
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