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Wikileaks is no stranger to attacks and litigation. And they are no stranger to breaking important information either. Previously Wikileaks had published important documents such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq, and the 2003 and 2004 Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, an act that has gained them some notoriety and probably extra scrutiny.
But in a totally unprecedented and one-sided move, a U.S. District Court for Northern California issued its ruling, without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court, ordering:
Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and 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.In essence this means taking down the Wikileaks website and locking down the domain name, which prevents the transfer of the domain name to a different domain registry.
Julie Turner, an attorney in California who has represented Wikileaks in the past, was surprised that the court would sanction such a broad agreement saying "It's like saying that Time magazine published one page of sensitive material so (someone can) seize the entire magazine and put a lock on their presses." After learning that the bank’s lawyers would be filing suit, Turner asked where the suit would be filed, so that an attorney could be found in the appropriate jurisdiction to represent Wikileaks. But Julius Baer Bank's lawyers refused. Two and a half weeks later, the restraining order against Dynadot and Wikileaks came out of a San Francisco court.
Turner blames the bank for not having better security over its documents. "If you’re dealing with banking records … if your bread and butter is confidentiality in banking, then you'd really better have mechanisms by which you can control documents. The bank itself should have had better security mechanisms rather than allowing employees to take electronic copies of things or make copies of things and remove them. That's not Wikileaks' fault." She also said the bank could have simply responded to the claims and cleared the whole thing up, if the whistleblower's documents were wrong.
It really doesn't matter what Wikileaks posted. It's the draconian scope of the order — censorship at its ugliest, with no regard for the First Amendment or due process — that is so very frightening. If this can be done successfully to Wikileaks, it can be done successfully to any website to which those in high places might object.
You have to wonder who stood to be exposed for possibly participating in less-than-honorable banking practices — global elitists, high-level government officials, or politicians and other entertainers. Exactly who had enough clout to pull such strong strings?
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