US judge arranges summary execution of Wikileaks.org
Many-headed whistleblower site still standing
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The US arm of Wikileaks, a website that makes it easy for whistleblowers to leak documents, has been cut off after hosting evidence that claimed a bank located in the Cayman Islands engaged in money laundering and tax evasion.
Dynadot
http://www.dynadot.com/ , the US-based company that hosted Wikileaks' main site http://wikileaks.org/ , not only severed wikileaks.org from the net; it also agreed to lock the domain name so it can't be transferred to another provider. A federal judge in San Francisco signed off on the agreement on Friday (15 Feb).
The agreement came in a lawsuit brought by bank Julius Baer, the parent company of the accused Cayman bank. After trying unsuccessfully to get Wikileaks to remove the documents, Swiss-based Julius Baer went after Dynadot, which according to this copy of the court order http://wikileaks.in/w/images/Dynadot-injunction.pdf , agreed to roll over in exchange for the suit against it being dismissed. Dynadot also agreed to turn over records related to Wikileaks, including "IP addresses and associated data used by any person, other than Dynadot, who accessed the account for the domain name".
Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to post documents anonymously - at least when its webhost isn't coerced into turning over IP addresses and other information most customers would consider confidential.
According to this piece http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/cayman-island-b.html from Wired News, Wikileaks was unable to argue its position on the matter at a Friday court hearing because it only learned of the hearing a few hours before it started. Astonishingly, US District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California signed off on the stipulation, anyway.
The episode is another reminder that an organization's security is only as good as the security of the people who provide its internet connection. Wikileaks claims that it is an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis". But this is true only if its webhosts can be trusted not to pull the plug on its customers or divulge sensitive client information.
In this case Julius Baer quickly realized it couldn't silence Wikileaks, so it went after a weaker link in the chain, which evidently was much less willing to put up a fight.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by people from a host of countries, including the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. It has generated headlines by hosting documents exposing several high-profile scandals, including those related to the collapse of the UK's Northern Rock bank and to prisons in Iraq and and Guantanamo Bay. The site says it has posted more than 1.2 million documents.
According to Julius Baer, a former vice president called Rudolf Elmer posted the documents, which purport to show that the Cayman Islands bank helped customers hide assets and launder funds.
The contested documents remain available on Wikileaks websites hosted in other countries, including in here in Belgium http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks and here in India http://wikileaks.in/wiki/Wikileaks . The site says here http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks_survives_censorship%2C_ddos%2C_fire that over the past few days it has also withstood a 500 Mbps denial-of-service attack and a fire to its uninterruptible power supply.
Of course, there's no evidence that Julius Baer was behind either the attacks or the fire. But it's clear that Wikileaks hasn't been silenced, at least for now.
Hey, maybe there really is something to these claims about being uncensorable. ®
Many-headed whistleblower site still standing
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The US arm of Wikileaks, a website that makes it easy for whistleblowers to leak documents, has been cut off after hosting evidence that claimed a bank located in the Cayman Islands engaged in money laundering and tax evasion.
Dynadot
http://www.dynadot.com/ , the US-based company that hosted Wikileaks' main site http://wikileaks.org/ , not only severed wikileaks.org from the net; it also agreed to lock the domain name so it can't be transferred to another provider. A federal judge in San Francisco signed off on the agreement on Friday (15 Feb). The agreement came in a lawsuit brought by bank Julius Baer, the parent company of the accused Cayman bank. After trying unsuccessfully to get Wikileaks to remove the documents, Swiss-based Julius Baer went after Dynadot, which according to this copy of the court order
http://wikileaks.in/w/images/Dynadot-injunction.pdf , agreed to roll over in exchange for the suit against it being dismissed. Dynadot also agreed to turn over records related to Wikileaks, including "IP addresses and associated data used by any person, other than Dynadot, who accessed the account for the domain name". Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to post documents anonymously - at least when its webhost isn't coerced into turning over IP addresses and other information most customers would consider confidential.
According to this piece
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/cayman-island-b.html from Wired News, Wikileaks was unable to argue its position on the matter at a Friday court hearing because it only learned of the hearing a few hours before it started. Astonishingly, US District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California signed off on the stipulation, anyway. The episode is another reminder that an organization's security is only as good as the security of the people who provide its internet connection. Wikileaks claims that it is an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis". But this is true only if its webhosts can be trusted not to pull the plug on its customers or divulge sensitive client information.
In this case Julius Baer quickly realized it couldn't silence Wikileaks, so it went after a weaker link in the chain, which evidently was much less willing to put up a fight.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by people from a host of countries, including the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. It has generated headlines by hosting documents exposing several high-profile scandals, including those related to the collapse of the UK's Northern Rock bank and to prisons in Iraq and and Guantanamo Bay. The site says it has posted more than 1.2 million documents.
According to Julius Baer, a former vice president called Rudolf Elmer posted the documents, which purport to show that the Cayman Islands bank helped customers hide assets and launder funds.
The contested documents remain available on Wikileaks websites hosted in other countries, including in here in Belgium
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks and here in India http://wikileaks.in/wiki/Wikileaks . The site says here http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks_survives_censorship%2C_ddos%2C_fire that over the past few days it has also withstood a 500 Mbps denial-of-service attack and a fire to its uninterruptible power supply. Of course, there's no evidence that Julius Baer was behind either the attacks or the fire. But it's clear that Wikileaks hasn't been silenced, at least for now.
Hey, maybe there really is something to these claims about being uncensorable. ®
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Comments
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The nature of Law
21.02.2008 18:31
It is astounding that a Bank Head Office should put itself in the firing line to protect one of its cheating underlings. Swiss integrity would be better served by them dropping a ton of bricks on their cheat enabler. This action puts the ethics of all Swiss Banks into doubt.
Is Julius Baer telling us that all its clients are tax cheats?
Is the Swiss Franc still backed by Gold? Are they safe for holding our cash reserves? the Pound and the US Dollar certainly are not.
Ilyan
Ilyan
21.02.2008 20:40
But basically civil law has always been about money. Corporate law strategies often work on the premise of fiscal attrition, whether as an offensive tactic or to inform defensive tactics.
Civil law as we know it is there to protect the rich, and to keep their lackeys (the legals) fat. In an ideal world, all law would be "free at the point of use". But that would be forgetting that we the majority are just livestock.
The good thing about the net, for the time being, is that there is usually some country that will host you and ignore bleating from the State Dept. and the Foreign Office.
However, national sovereignty hasn't stopped the U.S. from enforcing its law abroad. Such as in the case of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arrest of a Russian software cracker. Which to be fair shocked even Adobe (the affected company), or perhaps they realised the public outcry was hurting them, they publicly disavowed the legal proceedings.
Strangely enough IMC Seattle ended up in bed with a big law firm that was involved in busting private individuals for uploading cracked software under the DMCA 2000- often they were serving writs on people outside their jurisdiction... or at least someone was using their boilerplate to do so:
But to be fair trying to find an ethical civil lawyer is a tall order. And if you can trust a lawyer with one thing, that is they aren't going to tell you before you shake hands that they would sell their grandmother into slavery without losing a wink of sleep.
But back on topic. As someone commented somewhere out there: what a marketting coup for Baer. A statement, "You come near our clients and we'll fuck you from on up high". Offshore banking thrives on two things "confidentiality" and tax dodges. They aren't shy about it. And the Swiss banks are nigh on religious about confidentiality.
trawler
More source
21.02.2008 23:23
Media Statement on Behalf of Dynadot in re: Wikileaks Litigation
Full correspondence between Wikileaks and Bank Julius Baer
good general background on wikileaks:
Also read the talk section
Might be amusing to see what these people may have to say about it all since there is no statement on their site:
gitmo:
trawler
Reg update
22.02.2008 01:09
Analysis
Every now and again, an event comes along and takes our breath away by reminding us just how far out of step the legal system can be with today's changing world. The latest example is last week's attempt by a federal judge in California to shutter Wikileaks, a website devoted to disclosing confidential information that exposes unethical behavior.
Almost a week after US District Judge Jeffrey White unequivocally ordered the disabling of the guerrilla outfit, it remains up, and its foot soldiers are as defiant as ever. More to the point, it continues to host internal documents purporting to prove that a bank located in the Cayman Islands engaged in money laundering and tax evasion - the same documents that landed it in hot water in the first place.
It remains doubtful that Wikileaks will ever be shut down. That's because the site, as reported earlier by the The New York Times Bits blog, is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based outfit that provides highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services to its customers. It has almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.
Oh yeah, PRQ is also run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, two of the founders of The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker site that, as a frequent target of the Hollywood elite, has amassed considerable expertise in withstanding legal attacks from powerful corporate interests.
Ivan Fyodorovich
Homepage:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/wikileaks_bulletproof_hosting/
Trawler
23.02.2008 10:24
Bush has probably already maintained industrial pollution sufficiently to cause the climate change that terminates Life on Earth. People can decide for themselves whether Bush is an agent for the Wrath of God preparing for a freah start at evolution, or an agent of Satan destroying this Creation of Life to spite God.
Ilyan
Ilyan
24.02.2008 16:05
A criminal case could have been instigated, and of course the outcome of teh criminal case would have superseded the Supreme Court's previous ruling, and the whole thing could end up back in the Supreme Court...
UK
Well, up until the European Court was established the Lords was the highest court for England & Wales and a similar body in Scotland headed up by the Lord Advocate.
Nowadays, you can take a case all the way to the Lords and then after that the European Court can hear your case. I know someone who did this, and lost every step of the way sadly. Made himself bankrupt and got disbarred from his profession into the bargain. That's what I call tenacious, stubborn and moreover righteous!
Interestingly I found this on wikipedia:
"The Constitution does not explicitly grant the Supreme Court the power of judicial review; nevertheless, the power of the Supreme Court to overturn laws and executive actions it deems unlawful or unconstitutional is a well-established precedent."
And this:
"Reversal of Court Decisions. Political action does not take place in a vacuum. Any congressional enactment or effort to enact that has an adverse impact on the courts is usually directed to altering or reversing a decision of the Federal courts, not necessarily a Supreme Court case,6 although, of course, Supreme Court cases are typically the most noteworthy. "
So it seems that Congress has some powers to overturn the the Supreme Court. And that the SC can overturn Congress. But really I know very little about the US system apart from the fact it is mind bogglingly crackers.
I thought UK system was shit because Blair could win with the least amount of votes as a percentage, but for Gore to win more votes and lose??? WTF!
Anyway, normally it doesn't matter who gets in the rich always rule. But that time round it was obvious Bush= war. And next time around we can expect more of the same.
The US is economically fucked. It's not a question whether the collapse will happen, it is when it will happen, if it hasn't already. Which makes a dangerous animal.
trawler