Whistle-blower site taken offline

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.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

Other orders included that the domain name be locked "to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar" to prevent changes being made to the site.
Wikileaks claimed that the order was "unconstitutional" and said that the site had been "forcibly censored".

Hefur enginn hérna áhuga á alvöru njósnum og upplýsingalekum ?

Hefur enginn hérna áhuga á alvöru njósnum og upplýsingalekum ?

Já ... ég held að netfrelsi muni fara halloka á næstu árum. Stórfyrirtæki og hagsmunaaðilar ýmsir hverjir eru augljóslega orðnir langþreyttir á þessu blessaða interneti.

Múslímar eru vandamál sem mun leysast af sjálfu sér. Græðgi stórfyrirtækja og ritskoðunartilhneiging ríkisstjórna mun hinsvegar ekki gera það.

Ég tek helst eftir því að það er nákvæmlega ekkert á þessari síðu um íslensku spillinguna. Það veldur mér talsverðum vonbrigðum þar sem ég hélt að við værum þekktari í útlöndum en þetta. Landkynningin hefur mistekist.

So how does the United States fit into this picture?

The court order that muzzled Wikileaks.org (covered here) was prompted not by the government but by a bank registered in the Cayman Islands. The bank used American courts and a compliant domain registrar to scrub the wikileaks.org URL from the Internet. It is extremely unlikely that this decision will stand up in an appeals court, but the larger point is that there is no reason this case should even be fought. Wikileaks should not need a legal team to explain to the courts that the First Amendment requires freedom of speech.

The whole event seems to encapsulate the constant criticism of governance in the United States: that the government has been captured by corporate interests, and that the world-leading rule of law and technocratic mechanisms in place can be hijacked to serve as tools for narrow, wealthy interests.

But a host of free-speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.