Wikileaks censored by US Court

Feature proposal: http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/mmid/imc-uk-features/2008-0221-8m

Abstract

Transparency website Wikileaks has been muzzled with a legal injunction by a US court following the publication of leaked documents about a Swiss bank implicated in alleged money laundering. The anonymous whistleblower site, devoted to battle against corruption and censorship, published several hundred documents from a Swiss banking whistleblower purportedly showing that Bank Julius Baer and its Cayman Islands subsidiary had been involved in offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and, in some cases, politically sensitive clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru. Rather than ordering the removal of specific documents, the San Francisco District Court ordered Wikileak's DNS registrar, Dynadot, to remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent it from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page. There have also been reports of attempts to lock down the site through Denial of Service attacks and threats to its DNS record.

Knowing that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, its founders had created an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking secret documents. Thus, while Wikileaks.org is down, other mirrors (copies of the site) are still up and running, like wikileaks.be. The site can also still be accessed via its IP hosted in Sweden.

Wikileaks has published important leaked documents, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya that apparently affected the Kenyan elections.

US judge arranges summary execution of Wikileaks.org | US Court order shuts down Wikileaks.org | US court attacks web freedom, enjoins Wikileaks.org out of existence | Wikileaks and Internet Censorship: a comparative study | Full correspondence between Wikileaks and Bank Julius Baer | Wikileaks and Northern Rock | Reports elsewhere: IndyBay | Indymedia Ireland | About Wikileaks