Swiss Bank Julius Baer has successfully petitioned a California court to shut down Wikileaks.org, a neat-o site where whistleblowers can use a secure connection to anonymously leak sensitive information about their employers’ shady dealings.
According to the CBC, Wikileaks says that the bank is acting to prevent the leaking of “documents allegedly relating to bank business in the Cayman Islands.” Makes you wonder if wikileaks wasn’t about to break a scandal about some shady banking in the notorious island tax haven.
While the site has real potential for propagandists and rumour-starters, it has also played a big role in unearthing important documents, like the one that authorized U.S. troops to chase insurgents from Iraq into Syria and Iran. Today’s Sydney Morning Herald writes:
The site has also published millions of sensitive documents, including the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the primary operations manual for the running of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and evidence of involvement by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi, in a $US4.5 billion money laundering scheme.
The bank’s victory is only partial - mirror sites operate from Belgium and other countries, and wikileaks can still be accessed at sites like wikileaks.be. As well, because of what seems like a loophole in the ruling, the U.S. site is still accessible at its IP address: 88.80.13.160, even though www.wikileaks.org now brings you to a “server not found” error page.
You can guess what I think of all this, so I’ll spare you the sermon. The happy irony here is that because of the headlines generated by one bank’s attempt to keep its (allegedly) dirty laundry under wraps, hordes of potential whistleblowers will hear about the site. While checking the Belgian site on my break today, I got the following message:
“Wikileaks servers are overloaded. While the domain name “wikileaks.org” has been censored in the United States, in violation of that country’s constitution, this server has not been censored — except by its extreme popularity.”
2 responses so far ↓
1 Rawda // Feb 20, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Fantastic! I actually checked out the site, and this is what I got while the page loaded -figured you might like this- :
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor polular but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right. -Martin Luther King, Jr.”
2 Julian // Feb 21, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Let me just say that the Wikileaks logo is pure genius
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