US Judge Censors Freedom Of Speech

[GhostShip]

In what amounts to an attack on free speech a US Judge made an order that "gags" a site specialising in exposing official corruption.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/US_court_attacks_web_freedom


I took a look at what the site (wikileaks.org)  has to offer in the way of interesting story lines and many I saw are rather a good read 

[Cobra]

The site domain seems to be off of the DNS. So it is either having flooding issues or someone took it down since yesterday. A little irony in this matter comes from reading the first line of what anouther website said about it:

"Wikileaks.org is an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."

So much for "uncensorable".

[GhostShip]

Oh ye of little faith Cobra 

http://Wikileaks.org.uk/

http://Wikileaks.be

Plus the many mirrors that flew up to defend freedom of speech, the whole site is also available on torrent sites to avoid US censorship, you just cant beat good publicity 

[Update]

http://blogs.mediapost.com/online_minute/?p=1671

In a case that has free speech advocates fuming, a federal district court judge in San Francisco issued an order directing the site Wikileaks, which hosts “secret” documents submitted by whistleblowers, to remove all information relating to the Swiss bank Julius Baer.

That injunction, signed Friday by Judge Jeffrey White, amends a far broader one he signed earlier that day, which would have shuttered the site in the United States. That earlier order directed domain registrar Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks domain, return blank pages to anyone who tried to access the site, and also turn over the IP addresses of any users “who accessed the account for the domain name.”

But despite Julius Baer’s preliminary court victory, the bank may well have already lost the public relations war. As of Tuesday morning, Wikileaks is still accessible online, Even if Julius Baer should succeed in taking down those links, the documents are also available via BitTorrent.

One of course wonders why the global tax authorities are not interested in rooting out the folks behind the alleged tax avoidance operation.







 

[GhostShip]

In an update to this story this was published today.

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15109

A federal judge in San Francisco has reversed himself after ordering a whistle-blower site to be shut down.

US district judge Jeffrey White was roundly, and universally, criticised by news organisations and civil liberties groups when on February 15 he ordered Net registrar Dynadot to take down Wikileaks.org, and also blocked it from moving to another server.

 Now, "After a three-hour hearing Friday, White dissolved the injunction," says the San Francisco Chronicle, going on:

"He also rejected the bank’s request to extend a restraining order that required Wikileaks and the Internet registrar to remove the bank documents from the Web site. The restraining order expired Friday. Such decrees raise ’serious questions of prior restraint (on speech) and possible violations of the First Amendment,’ White said.

"He also said federal courts may lack jurisdiction over the case because the bank has failed to show that Wikileaks, or anyone responsible for its operations, is based in the United States."

Its nice to see that enough people cared to raise the voice of protest over this issue, well done to all the civil liberties groups for working fast and together to get a poor judgement lifted.