The United States has blocked Americans’ access to an entire Web site.
Really.
Wikileaks is a site where whistleblowers can anonymously post information and documents showing their companies or governments are engaged in illegal activities.
In one case, Rudolf Elmer, former COO of the Swiss banking group Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands operation, posted such documents purporting to show that the bank was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. The bank’s lawyers convinced Judge Jeffery White of California (still trying to find out which court specifically) to order that the site’s domain registrar, Dynadot, remove the site’s hosting records.
In plain English, that means that if you try to go to wikileaks.org, your computer won’t know where that is. Try it. The Wikileaks people weren’t even given enough notice to appear at the hearing.
Wow.
And, according to the BBC,
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.
But you can still access the site easily — you just have to go to one of the alternative Wikileaks sites, such as
or
or go to the IP address directly.
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
Read the text of the injunction. (PDF)
Read the documents that are the cause of the hubbub.
The Fray
Richard says:
Right off the bat, I don’t know what to make of this because the issue is so complicated. However, the civil libertarian in me is screaming at the top of his lungs about a federal court system stacked with right-wing Bush wackos, a breakdown of the separation of powers, and abridgement of First Amendment rights.
The difference between America under Bush and, say, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia is that in the latter cases stifling free speech and controlling mass media preceded institution of a authoritarian government.
See Lawrence Britt’s “14 Characteristics of Fascism”:
Randy says:
Well, the order and the event suck, but this once again proves that the internet views censorship as a network outage and routes around it. Thanks, Andrew, for making it easier for the ‘net to work as designed.
Randy says:
Continues gaining traction, I think:
http://binaryfreedom.info/node/312
Thanks, Andrew, for your recent focus on information freedom/availability, routing around censorship, or whatever you want to call it. These last handful of posts are the best you’ve ever put up, I think.
gnomic says:
WOW! Is this part of the new world order? A US judge ordering the censorship of a perfectly legal web site. It violates judicial principles to issue an overly broad gag order. You have to wonder if its just stupidity or incompetance (This isn’t one of Bush right wing christian lawyers, is it? They ain’t too bright)