It smells like victory

posted by The Sailor @ 6:17 PM Permalink

Bump and update: Bush appointee Judge White has done a 180 and now acknowledges he might have been just a bit hasty in shutting down a whole website because a money-laundering Swiss Bank operating in the Cayman Islands objected to being outed.

The bad news is Judge White still insists he has jurisdiction, even tho Wikileaks, the JB Bank, and The Caymans are not in the US.

The good news is Wikileaks is back online!

Original post:
VIA Talking Points Memo we learn that a US court shut down a whole website with a permanent injunction. Here's Wired's article about it:

Cayman Islands Bank Gets Wikileaks Taken Offline in U.S.

Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

Why would a US judge, (Jeffrey Steven White) rule for a Swiss company operating in the Caymans and order a US ISP to scrub their Domain Name Server(s) of the existence of this website?

And the judge, (Jeffrey Steven White), didn't rule that only the offending documents should be removed, he didn't say it was TRO while he resolved the litigation, he told the ISP to scrub their entire DNS as if the site had never existed.

Yeah Judge, good luck with that. Maybe next you can rule that the pee be taken out of a swimming pool.

But the scariest part is that Judge Jeffrey Steven White ordered the site to maintain records of anyone who had ever accessed the site.

You can still access the site thru their IP# and they also have mirrors worldwide.

Not to mention the 3rd party sites that have mirrored the Wikileaks site.

Here are some lowlights of the court's ruling.

The whole ruling can be viewed here (warning PDF.)

BTW, guess who appointed Judge Jeffrey S. White to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California?

Yep, that would be Bush.



Cross posted at SteveAudio

Labels: free and independent press, Freedom of speech