Judge orders WikiLeaks offline, then backs off
by Richard Koman
ZD Net, Where Technology Meets Business
February 19, 2008
The WikiLeaks.org site is offline today, following a series of orders from a US District Court in San Francisco. WikiLeaks had posted numerous documents “allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.” (WikiLeaks press release, Feb. 18, 2008.))
...In a somewhat confusing flurry of orders, the court first ordered operator Dynadot LLC to “immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information, until further order of this Court.” (Order Granting Permanent Injunction, Feb. 15, 2008.))
...But hours later the court amended the order, removing the requirement to disable the entire WikiLeaks domain but ordering that all JB documents be removed from all servers. This new order is a temporary restraining order, where the first order was a permanent injunction. Both orders were issued after an ex parte hearing, to which WikiLeaks says it received only hours notice.
It seems that WikiLeaks lawyers were able to convince the judge that something was amiss here, because the second order, a TRO, provides WikiLeaks an opportunity to answer (by Feb. 20) and JB to respond to that answer (by Feb. 26.) One question is whether JB lied about there being a stipulation for WikiLeaks to go offline, since WL compained so vociferously about it and the order was so quickly amended.
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3663
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