The US version of a whistle-blowing site has been shut down following a court ruling – but versions in other countries remain.
Wikileaks isn’t popular with governments or corporations. It’s a site that lets users anonymously post documents about the wrongdoings of,well, governments and corporations. But its US version has now been taken offline after a ruling by a court in California, according to the BBC. The rulingfollowed a case brought by Swiss banking group Julius Baer regarding some documents that appeared to have been posted by the former VP of its Cayman Islandoperation. The documents seemed to indicate that Julius Baer was involved with tax evasion and money laundering. They’d asked for the removal of the documents because of their potentialeffect on a Swiss court case. Wikileaks wasn’t represented and insisted it was “given only hours notice” by e-mail before the hearing. The hearing resulted in a decision thatDynadot, which controls the domain name, had to remove Wikileaks from its servers as of last FRiday. Additionally, it had to "prevent the domain name fromresolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court" and lock the domain name so it couldn’t betransferred to a different server. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wikileaks claimed censorship and that the order was “unconstitutional.” Dynadot was given six court orders byJudge Jeffery White, including the production of "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account" and "IP addresses andassociated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name." Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by a loose coalition of scientists, journalists and dissidents and claimsto have published more than a million documents. Although the US site has bitten the dust, versions of the site in other countries remain firmly online.
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