Posted on 02/19/2008 11:55:22 AM PST by Nachum
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.
Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.
Wikileaks, in case you’ve never heard of it, has been gaining profile as the place to put information that someone is trying to keep under cover:
The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.
Doesn’t have the authority to take down the DNS either... just have to make the primary DNS server for this domain outside the US... this judge is an ignorant a$$.
I know what you mean, nobody wears pantyhose anymore, not even Joe Namath.
Probably a firewall blocking ping and/or traceroute UDP ports or an access-list on a router. Non-necessarily censorship...try a telnet on port 80 to the IP.
Ping
telnet on port 80 failed. I pinged from nwtools.com outside the local network. I used to work for a hosting company and watched the governments of Thailand, Vietnam and the like do the same thing to sites they deemed subversive. I just didn’t think it was going on here in the Good Old USA.
Here’s another article on this:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080218214544.b8qg68q6&show_article=1
A website designed to let whistleblowers publish sensitive documents has been ordered shut down by a US federal judge at the request of a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, court documents showed Monday.
US District Judge Jeffrey White in California, in an injunction order dated Friday, ordered the shutdown of the website known as Wikileaks.org
The judge ruled in favor of Swiss-based Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. and its Cayman Islands subsidiary Julius Baer Bank & Trust, saying that “immediate harm will result to (the bank) in the absence of injunctive relief.”
White ordered the California web hosting company Dynadot to “immediately clear and remove” records from Wikileaks and “prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank page,” until the court can review the case further.
Wikileaks was launched in early 2007 with the help of Chinese dissidents to help whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive documents on the Internet without being traced.
It was aimed at “oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East,” but also was being used to post “unethical” behavior in Western countries.
The shutdown came after the website posted documents relating to offshore activities of Julius Baer. A series of documents cited in the court order have titles that include “tax avoidance,” “tax evasion,” and “offshore tax scheme.”
Wikileaks said in an e-mail statment: “The order was entirely written by Cayman Islands Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by Judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003.”
The obvious response to something like this is to (anonymously) flood it with disinformation.
Here’s from another site:
The owners of the website have setup several mirror servers around the globe, most of which are being hammered at the moment as the story gains traction. The website notes that U.S. now joins China and Thailand as the only countries where the website has been censored:
When the transparency group Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no-one was too surprised. After all, the Chinese government also censors the Paris based Reporters Sans Frontiers and New York Based Human Rights Watch. And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand’s military Junta, no-one was too surprised when people in that country had to go to extra lengths to read the site. But on Friday the 15th, February 2008, in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”, the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown.
The group says it will now ramp up its efforts to expose illegal or unethical banking practices. The group says they have six pro-bono attorneys trying to handle the assault in San Francisco.
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