WikiLeaks back up and running after lawsuit shutdown
Mar 3rd, 2008 by Rob
Another update of a previous story: A federal judge ruled Friday that the leaked-documents website WikiLeaks would be allowed to re-open after initially being shut down for posting confidential bank documents.
The unusual case involved internal documents from the Cayman Islands branch of Swiss bank Julius Baer, purported to include highly damaging information regarding money laundering and other illegal activity. Although WikiLeaks’ owner is Australian, his domain host Dynadot—which dodged a lawsuit by agreeing to close access to the site—is American, which was apparently enough to trigger the jurisdiction of the U.S. court system.
After a mild outcry from civil liberties groups such as the ACLU and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, San Francisco federal district court Judge Jeffrey White reconsidered the initial injunction, writing,
“It is clear that in all but the most exceptional circumstances, an injunction restricting speech pending final resolution of the constitutional concerns is impermissible.”
The case is strange because the parties are from different countries, yet even the American standard of the First Amendment was (at first) not enough to protect the site’s right to publish the documents. It’s always tricky to determine what kind of sensitive information can be released, but here it seems that WikiLeaks did nothing different than any other media organization would do when presented with the same information.
