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Why Did A California Court Hide All Of WikiLeaks Over A Single Document?
from the seems-excessive dept
Over a year ago, we wrote about the Wikileaks project, designed to allow government and company officials to anonymously leak documents as a way of whistleblowing questionable activities. Apparently, it's been quite successful at times. However, in doing so, it's also building up a list of enemies, including one who has apparently convinced a California court to make the entire site disappear in the US. The Swiss banking group, Julius Baer, was upset by documents found on the site that they believe were posted by a former VP at the bank, alleging that the bank was involved in money laundering operations. Julius Baer's lawyers claim that having these documents public could influence ongoing litigation in Switzerland (one assumes having to do with money laundering). While it's understandable that the bank might not want those documents online, or that those documents might impact current litigation, that doesn't explain why the California court ordered the entire site offline, demanded that its registrar block the transfer of the domain, force the registrar to point all visitors to a blank page and also having the registrar hand over all information on IP addresses of people who accessed the wikileaks site. All of that seems rather excessive, and of questionable legality. After all, doesn't Section 230 of the CDA provide safe harbor for the service provider? I could see an order demanding the specific documents be taken down, but the rest of the order seems to go well beyond what's both reasonable and standard in cases of this nature. The folks behind Wikileaks are equally perplexed, noting that they were only given a few hours warning before the hearing, meaning they were unable to attend or send representation. All in all this seems rather excessive, especially compared to existing similar cases on record. Even odder about all of this is that since the court went after the registrar, not whoever is actually hosting the site, you can apparently still reach the actual site if you know the IP address.
Reader Comments
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Think about the kind of people who use Cayman Island accounts. Not just Government but organized crime, drug cartels, etc. It would'nt take much more than someone having their life threatened to get them to fast-track a cease and desist to a site like that.
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Government = the crooks
lots of cross breeding between corporations, criminals and government. it get hard to distinguish one from the other after a while.
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Re: Government = the crooks
First off Mr. conspiracy nut, learn to use proper English.
Second there will always be a difference between companies and government - just one will use the other.
Third I bet you are a liberal who wants more and more government, which will only realize your fear.
Fourth go jump in front of a speeding train. You give our unfortunately shared name a bad reputation.
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Re: Re: Government = the crooks
Jesus Christ! Talk about an angry nut! Get back on your meds!
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Re: Re: Government = the crooks
I believe the government has grown more under the Republicans , than it has under Democrats. Under Bush, the government has grown vastly and our Constitution has shrunk terribly. I don't think it is a case of Liberal or Conservative now. It is a case of Fascist or democratic government.
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Re: Government = the crooks
Good point. One can not tell the difference in left or right criminal behavior.
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WOW
It isn't often that you see a display of raw naked power. Someone high on the food chain must be involved in the bank.
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http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks and the bank will likely go after that sometime soon.
But this will backfire. At this point, no doubt, lots of people are replicating the material and will put it up elsewhere. Further, the publicity (which will embarrass the Judge who made the ruling as others weigh in on it) will lead to orders of magnitude more people knowing about this case than would have known about it otherwise.
And the best we, as TechDirt readers, can do is help get that word out :-)
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Re:
all documents have been saved on my PC and already are up on piratebay courtesy of others. Don't expect this to stay under long, if at all.
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Re:
I couldn't agree with you more. I hope this judge get made an example of.
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The Registrar
Why doesn't it suprise me that Godaddy is the registrar? They seem to cave at the drop of a hat.
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Re: The Registrar
As they fucking should! When handed a judicial order, you follow it!
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Re: Re: The Registrar
As they fucking should! When handed a judicial order, you follow it!
Questionable orders can be contested. Godaddy is know for not doing so even when they should. Hence, they seem to cave at the drop of a hat.
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host IP?
So any chance we can dig up the host IP address so we can see what all the fuss is about?
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Wikileaks
You can still reach the overseas servers - wikileaks.cx, .be, and .de
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One would think printing T-shirts with a summary of the leak is the obvious solution...unless the same judge will issue an order for police to strip citizens of their shirts.
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What's that judge trying to hide?
Considering that Wikileaks specializes in exposing government (including judicial) corruption, is it any surprise to see a government judge trying to wipe it out? I wonder if someone threatened to expose something about that judge or his buddies there.
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asdf
that judge should be removed from public outcry over limits of freedom of speech. and to be protecting money laundering etc of people over seas..? i mean the cayman islands is a constant movie reference.. it's not an accident.
i wonder what that judge didn't want wikileaks to disclose about her that she is so worried about
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asdf
that judge should be removed from public outcry over limits of freedom of speech. and to be protecting money laundering etc of people over seas..? i mean the cayman islands is a constant movie reference.. it's not an accident.
i wonder what that judge didn't want wikileaks to disclose about her that she is so worried about
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Re: asdf
Judge is doing good job and not an idiot.
Under US law this situation is the only avenue for overturning or amending DMCA. If the judge had not taken site down then wikileaks would have won the case. Therefore they would have no case to appeal and therefore could not challenge the DMCA on any grounds at all. It's a sure bet some hotshot lawyer at Wikileaks has been waiting for the "right" case to challenge the DMCA laws on. When it's all over the DMCA laws will be amended, the lawyer will be famous, and the bank thing will still be tied up in courts because the money wants the problem to go away till the money makers have planned their get away. So in this case the money wants the DMCA fight to last long so they can plan thier evasions, the wikileaks lawyer wants the fight to be big so they can challence DMCA on a winning case. it's a win win situation for both legal parties.
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Re: Re: asdf
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Re: Re: asdf
The real beauty of this case is that The Bank doesn't give a rats A bout the DMCA laws and will happily indulge wikileaks by taking up as much court time as possible to make wikileaks overturn as much DMCA as it can all so they can buy a few more days or months of freedom from prosecution. So if their is other unjust part of DMCA the bank wants to try to enforce it so Wikileaks will fight to have it overturned and be slower.
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http://88.80.13.160/
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Isn't it dynadot
not godaddy.com?
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Re: Isn't it dynadot
Looked at the .com, which is down too. I stand corrected.
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There's something fishy about this. Maybe it means I'm destined for a tinfoil hat some day, but I'm always inclined to think it's more likely that people with power and money are intelligent than that they are stupid.
There can't be many halfway Internet-savvy folks who don't grasp the Streisand effect by now. It makes no sense, legally or practically, to take down an entire well-publicized domain name over a single, identified document.
So I'd guess that the document is of no real importance and the bank doesn't really care about it; but either they or (more likely) someone else is using this as a pretext to throw a monkeywrench into Wikileaks — at least for a few days or weeks — in order to hide something of greater concern which will not be identified.
Of course, a conspiracy theory can never be shown to be true unless the conspiracy fails.
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Re:
Sadly, this is more believable than what is currently known to be happening.
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the Judge was following the law.
Sadly, I think the judge may have been acting properly in this case. After reading the transcripts of the correspondence on the Wikileaks mirror site it seems more like wikileaks was trying to evade a court order. Under US law a court order has to be given to a specific person at a company legally responsible for answering and enforcing court orders such as subpoena. It's not a law system I personally feel results in justice, but it is the one we have.
If the judge didn't do as directed he would have been overturned on appeal. as it stands wikileaks lost this round and will have to appeal the decision and it will probably go up the ladder to the next higher court. Or maybe not, the next higher court can simply reject the request for an appeal by wikileaks. In order to appeal the decision wikileaks must now assume the burden of proof and somehow show the court actions were illegal. Most likely they will appeal on first amendment grounds and argue the the way the court resolved the problem was overbearing. Probably most people would agree with the overbearing claim and most likely the resolution method is the legal precendent wikileaks will be challenging. Maybe they can force a revision to the DMCA laws on this basis. I wish them luck.
this is just the first round in a long legal chess game. Someone, probably wikileaks, has grown tired of the current laws, and after waiting for a case it thinks it can win has picked a fight.
Sadly the only way to change an unjust law in US is to break it and then get arrested or punished for it and finally appeal the punishment as unjust to overturn the bad law. It's not possible in the US to just appeal a law without a case in question and you certainly don't want to appeal a bad law like the dmca Law in a situation where people would agree with the law such as a chinease company making thousands of illegal copies of the latest apple OS version. It is precisely because this particular use of the law was so wrong headed that Wikileaks chose to use it for the fight to challenge DMCA and create a new precedent and new law. and incite a court verdict with the hope of apealing it and eventually setting a new precedent that will become a law. The real question we should be asking, is what legal precedent exactly does wikileaks hope to set with this action?
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ps. the judge must know all this.
p.s. the judge in question is probably aware of all this and if he had given wikileaks more warning it would have made their appeal and new precedent harder to achieve. As it stands now with all the media hoopla it's virtually assured to be reviewed by a higher court. So the judge is maybe just allowing himself to play the role of the bad guy in order to bump the fight up to the next highest court where a victory by wikileaks can change law for everyone instead of just changing a single case.
The judge: In 2005, White allowed environment groups and four municipalities to go forward with a lawsuit against federal agencies. The basis for the lawsuit was a claim that the federal government is contributing to global warming by funding various overseas projects.
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Re: the Judge was following the law.
steve,
You're mistaken. If you read the email correspondence between Wikileaks and the law firm that initially contacted them, the law firm refused to give any specifics regarding what documents were involved, refused to give any information other than "Legal proceedings will be commenced" in California, the UK and Switzerland. Wikileaks repeatedly asked for specifics so that they could provide the name of a lawyer that would be representing them. Obviously an international website with thousands of documents relating to issues in dozens of countries with a large pool of lawyers all over the world needs specifics to give a law firm correct contact details.
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Full_correspondence_bewtween_Wikileaks_and_Bank_Julius_Baer
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Re: Re: the Judge was following the law.
Josh,
I thought so, too, at first. If you reread the emails you will see the law firm was asking for contact information. In other words, who should we contact. Companies are required to have a registered agent. Wikileaks ignored that request and insisted instead on getting the client details. If the law firm wanted to have a confidential discussion with an attorney rather than a fairly open email exchange, such a request without disclosing the client, just the jurisdictions involved, would be completely appropriate. I doubt either party was being cooperative, but, rather, were just posturing--in the law firm's case with the judge, and in Wikileak's case with future general public support.
Overall, I'm on the side of Wikileak. Hopefully, the end result will be something good.
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Ten to one the judge is being quitely prodded to such excess by allies who have a grudge against wikileaks.
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2 Things
Having just read through the Wired article and it's comments, there are 2 things.
As one poster mentioned above to correct a few others of you, the Registrar is Dynadot, NOT GoDaddy..
2) Look who appointed this judge, Mr GWB. Hmmm.
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Step back
Everybody take a step back for a second. There is a lot of misinformation here concerning the reality of the judicial process.
As it states in the article, the order was entered without Wikileaks present. That means it was what is called ex parte. In nearly all jurisidictions, a party seeking an ex parte order must post a bond to cover potential damages of the unrepresented party. And the unrepresented party is guaranteed an opportunity to appear and litigate the issue, usually within a few days of the initial order. Lastly, in these situations, a judge is very likely (like it or not) to sign the proposed order of the petitioning party. She probably didn't quite understand the ramifications of the order she signed, but she knew it would be reconsidered in a few days, and the petitioning party posted a bond to cover any damages if the decision was ultimately incorrect.
Wait a few days on this one before you throw the judicial system (the entire government?) down the drain, folks.
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The Court has scheduled a hearing for 2/29/08. The amended order of court requires only the allegedly offending documents to be taken down. While inclusion of the ISP in the lawsuit seems problematic under the DMCA, they were not ordered to take down the entire site wikileaks, just the offending documents. If the ISP unilaterally took down the entire site, it seems to me to be an issue between the ISP and wikileaks (two private entities), and thus does not implicate the first amendment.
http://www.discourse.net/archives/docs/Baer_-_Amended_TRO_&_Order_to_Show_Cause.pd f
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This company hid Natzi Money, why would they not L
This Swiss Banking family "the Baers" who are of Jewish Ogin, knowingly hid Natzi money and possitions, that were stolen from the Jews.
So why is anyone supprised that they would not be involved in Landering Money.
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I'm a jew and I'm a victim of the corrupt govenment so that theory is wrong. If someone would investigate cases where lavely and singer are involved they will see that Judges make very very strange rulings.
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