Gawker
I hadn't heard of Wikileaks until a California judge granted an injunction against the site, where anyone can upload a leaked document, shutting it down summarily at the request of Bank Julius Baer. Wikileaks had published and analyzed sensitive documents that legally implicated the Cayman Islands bank. The Daily Kos has a roundup and points to the many copies of the site that won't be as easily shut down. The site has also survived a denial-of-service attack, and a fire. Good thing too, because this site makes the Smoking Gun look like TMZ.
The day after the injunction, Wikileaks' web servers (hosted in Sweden by the company who used to host the world's most infamous site for illegal downloads, The Pirate Bay) caught fire. Apparently that's under control now, so you can still read secret documents like the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, secret CIA funding for torture research, records of the U.S. violating the chemical weapons ban, FBI pedophile symbols, and operating procedure for Guantanamo.
(A technical note: What the government shut down was the domain, not the actual web host; if this happened to a bigger brand-name site, losing a domain could be devastating even if the site moved elsewhere. Plus this could lead to censorship of domain names themselves.)
Strangely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legal org which basically exists to scream bloody murder about this sort of censorship, hasn't written a thing about the shutdown; not even a link on their blog. It'd be nice to see some attention, since if this shutdown goes unchallenged, it sets a precedent for shutting down sites at the whims of their critics. Which would put a slight crimp on Gawker's style!
Comments
Maybe I am missing something, but how does a judge in the US have jurisdicion over web-servers in Sweden?
CanNOT believe that just happened. Am dumbfounded.. stricken, well, not speechless, but something-less.
@smartster: Mm, I'll edit to clarify.
WTF?! Now I gotta throw out my boylover-symbol earrings! Blast!
There used to be a much better leaked-doc site that specialized in CIA memos and such, and also listed an actual, itemized body count from the Iraq War (which, not surprisingly, was several orders of magnitude higher than "official" reports in the media). It was shut down about 6 months ago, which is a damned shame.
@Nick Douglas: Ok thanks. I mean I know that the Pirate Bay people were forced to relocate to Holland after a crack-down in Sweden, some say because of pressure from the US on Swedish authorities.
And for a while you couldn't access Pirate Bay at all, but now it seems up and running.
It just seems to me that with international partners etc, you could locate your servers anywhere. Isn't this the problem with shutting down spammers? I guess I am not clear on what an injunction actually does in this case. If you are putting stuff up through some server in Sweden, are you legally liable or is the host?
@smartster: I'm pretty sure the answer to your last question is still being fought over.
Meanwhile, if anyone sees a great Wikileaks article that's been overlooked, e-mail me at nick at toomuchnick dot com.
God DAMN. Is Cryptome so last century? I must keep up with the kids these days.
@Furious George: Is that cryptome? Maaan, I've got to update my bookmarks. They had at least half a dozen mirror sites, so presumably that stuff is still out there somewhere.
If no DNS servers in America were allowed to "resolve" wikileaks.org, you could only get to it by either specifying a foreign DNS server for yourself or entering their wesbite IP address like http:||88.80.13.160| but with the normal / instead of | (had to otherwise Gawker too-helpfully makes it a link).
Cryptome was the one I was thinking of.
I just got to it. Maybe it's only blocked in the US, because it's perfectly accessible up here in Canada. They're all over the wikileaks story.
A investigation must be started immediately into Judge Jeffrey White's court and where he presumes he has the legal authority to shut down a website based solely on the complaints of a corrupt corporate entity [in this case a Swiss Bank]. My view is that his actions are illegal and unconstitutional and should be fought at all costs. He has NO rights nor jurisdiction to take the actions that he has taken. It should also be determined if he has received a big bag of cash to pull off this nonsense. EFF where are you on this? Gentlemen, START YOUR INVESTIGATORS!
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