PRQ is reportedly operated by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracking site well known for being a frequent target of Hollywood movie studios and other intellectual property crusaders. Their history with that site has given PRQ's operators a wealth of experience in dealing with hostile legal action from corporate interests.

The company provides bulletproof hosting, secure no questions asked services to a limited number of customers, maintaining almost no customer information and keeping few or no logs of their activity.

Bulletproof hosting is best known perhaps for its popularity among spammers, gambling site operators and other less outright illegal but still less than legal endeavors. But as this story illustrates, it may be becoming a more valuable tool in the world of civil disobedience at a time when old-fashioned law enforcement techniques appear not to have caught up to the realities of the Internet.

US District Judge Jeffrey White issued the order to pull down Wikileaks Friday, February 15, at the behest of Swiss bank Julius Baer (juliusbaer.com), which accused the site of illegally hosting some documents that the poster alleges show the bank enabling activities like money laundering and tax evasion.

The all-points takedown notice has been criticized broadly as an offense against freedom of speech - particularly the decision to target a whole site to prevent the leak of a single set of user-posted documents. The order has been largely ineffective in silencing the site, which is still available via its IP address and at its India- (wikileaks.in) and Belgium-based (wikileaks.be) domains.

The order did succeed in causing US-based domain registrar Dynadot (dynadot.com)  to suspend the US-based site's .org domain name, but overall the injunction may have had the opposite of the desired effect. The site, along with its documents concerning Julius Baer, is still widely available online. And the popularity of the story may have only served to draw more attention to what was previously a mostly-unknown situation.

Wikileaks itself reportedly maintains servers at undisclosed locations and keeps information on sources deeply encrypted. The site's operators appear to have gone into the undertaking knowing the kind of challenges they might face.

Those who would have the site wiped from the Internet - rightly or wrongly - appear to be unprepared for the technical hurdles, and are relying on old-fashioned legal techniques and mostly-ineffectual bullying tactics.

PRQ, for its part, says it ignored the nasty letters it received from Julius Baer's lawyers.

The injunction issued by Judge White was a temporary one, and is reportedly up for re-evaluation on Friday, February 29.