A federal judge issued an order shutting down the wikileaks.com website.
The judge’s order came in a case brought by a Cayman Islands bank which contends in court filings that stolen documents have been provided to Wikileaks by “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign,” violating both a confidentiality agreement and banking law. The judge also ordered the domain registrar and Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents. Lawyers for both could not be reached by the newspaper for comment.
Meanwhile, in apparent reaction to the judge’s move, other “fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize” alternate addresses that can be used to access the Wikileaks site and have “also distributed copies of the sensitive bank information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks,” the Times reports.
The article also says that “the feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online.” (source)
Perhaps if we had less judges who attended the Ted Stevens school of technology, we would have less idiotic decisions like this one.
Apparently, the injunction was not only 100% unconstitutional, but it was also 100% ineffective. Wikileaks continues to publish at wikileaks.cx. Since the .cx TLD is beyond the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts, I doubt that will change.
