Wikileaks censored by US Court
imc-uk-features | 24.02.2008 11:57 | Repression | World
Transparency website Wikileaks has been muzzled with a legal injunction by a US court following the publication of leaked documents about a Swiss bank implicated in alleged money laundering. The anonymous whistleblower site, devoted to battle against corruption and censorship, published several hundred documents from a Swiss banking whistleblower purportedly showing that Bank Julius Baer and its Cayman Islands subsidiary had been involved in offshore tax evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and, in some cases, politically sensitive clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru. Rather than ordering the removal of specific documents, however, the San Francisco District Court ordered Wikileak's DNS registrar, Dynadot, to remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent it from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page. There have also been reports of attempts to lock down the site through Denial of Service attacks and threats to its DNS record.
From the newswire: US judge arranges summary execution of Wikileaks.org | US Court order shuts down Wikileaks.org | US court attacks web freedom, enjoins Wikileaks.org out of existence | Wikileaks and Internet Censorship: a comparative study | Full correspondence between Wikileaks and Bank Julius Baer | Reports elsewhere: IndyBay | Indymedia Ireland | About Wikileaks
Wikileaks has published important leaked documents in the past, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya that apparently affected the Kenyan elections. It has recently faced similar legal threats after publishing a confidential briefing memo relating to the dramatic collapse of the Northern Rock bank.
Knowing that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, its founders had created an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking secret documents. Thus, while Wikileaks.org is down, other mirrors (copies of the site) are still up and running, like wikileaks.be. The site can also still be accessed via its IP address in Sweden.
imc-uk-features
Additions
Judge reverses wikileaks ban
02.03.2008 15:29
Danny
Homepage:
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/02/29
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Bullet proof hosting
24.02.2008 16:29
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Also making a take-down difficult, Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information, according to an unidentified individual who answered a press inquiry sent to Wikileaks.
"Wikileaks certainly trusts no hosting provider," the person wrote.
There's a name for arrangements such as these. It's called "bulletproof hosting," and it's historically been used to insulate online criminal gangs against take-down efforts by law enforcers or private parties. As Wikileaks has demonstrated, the measure can also be used by those engaging in civil disobedience. Wikileaks uses a different term: "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking."
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Ivan Fyodorovich
ISPs sell your web history
27.02.2008 20:32
BT pimped customer web data to advertisers last summer
"For years, Internet service providers have watched with envy as the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sliced up the online advertising pie. Selling Internet access has been a good business, but selling Web advertising has been an even more lucrative one. Now, three Internet providers in Britain have teamed up to try to obtain a piece of online advertising for themselves. The three companies — BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media — announced a deal last week with a company called Phorm, whose technology tracks Web users and sends them ads related to their interests."
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Danny