Febraury 20, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Following an order last week from a US federal judge, the US arm of whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org was taken down, sparking a debate online concerning free speech, and whether free speech applies in these circumstances.
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On Friday, February 15, Swiss bank Julius Baer (juliusbaer.com) succeeded in obtaining an order demanding that the site's host take down Wikileaks, a site that enabled insiders to anonymously leak incriminating documents to the public.
Dynadot (dynadot.com) the US-based host that served the Wikileaks main site, reportedly agreed not only to take down the site, but to block the wikileaks.org domain from being transferred to another provider, and to turn over records related to the site, including IP addresses and other data used by people accessing the domain name's account.
While the US site is currently down, overseas versions of the site remained active as of Wednesday. A mirror of the site is online here.
Wikileaks caught Julius Baer's attention when a former Cayman Islands-based employee of the bank posted papers he says show illegal activities including money laundering and tax evasion taking place via the bank's accounts.
The operators of Wikileaks claim they were unable to argue their case in the Friday hearing because they only found out about it a few hours before the hearing began. The judge, however, signed off on the injunction.
According to this PDF copy of the court order, hosted not coincidentally by Wikileaks, Dynadot agreed to take down the site in exchange for the filing against Dynadot being dismissed. The permanent injunction was reportedly replaced with a temporary order that is up for review February 29.
While the circumstances have raised debate around the Web about government-sponsored censorship, there is some question as to whether the posting of these kinds of documents may break laws. The potential for the site to distribute trade secrets makes the situation more complicated than just censorship.
While it appears that Dynadot chose not to fight on behalf of its client, even though Wikileaks may not have had an adequate chance to defend its actions, it is not completely clear what arguments the bank made in favor of having the site shut down, and whether it was citing illegal activity by Wikileaks.
By shutting down the DNS along with the site, and by blocking the domain's transfer and handing over login information, it would seem that Dynadot was particularly assertive in its efforts to meet the bank's demands, however.
