Court shuts down Wikileaks

If you're actually naive enough to think the United States still has freedom of speech, that notion should be kablammoed out of your mind by this story.

There's a website called Wikileaks, which started a year ago and lets whistleblowers and dissidents anonymously release corporate and government documents from around the world. Part of the purpose of this site is to make sure journalists who are committed to government and corporate transparency aren't imprisoned for doing their job. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling had already deemed this mission to be constitutionally protected.

But now - following a lawsuit by Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss banking firm - the U.S. District Court for northern California has shut down Wikileaks. The court didn't just order Wikileaks to remove documents that may have exposed illegal activities by that firm. The court issued a permanent injunction shutting down Wikileaks altogether and disabling the wikileaks.org domain name.

This ruling is a clearly unconstitutional act of government censorship. Not like I expect the drive-by conservatives to give a shit what the Constitution says.

In addition, the court's order says Wikileaks must hand over the IP addresses and other data of anyone who accessed the domain name's account.

Fortunately, the right-wing federal court didn't count on Wikileaks also being hosted on servers in other countries. For example, Belgium and India have more press freedom than the U.S. does, and their copies of the site are still online. The Belgian site, for instance, can still be accessed at:

http://wikileaks.be

Luckily, Wikileaks is fighting the American court's order.

(Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7250916.stm;
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/18/91556/1784/766/458936)