Feb 18, 2008 03:54 PM
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San Francisco, 5:09 PM
Tue Feb 9
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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!
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