Saturday, March 01, 2008

News

Lights back on at wikileaks

Wikileaks.org, which had gone dark as a result of a court order, is now back online. Following a 3-hour hearing Friday in San Francisco, federal Judge Jeffrey White ruled in favor of the whistleblower website on jurisdictional and 1st Amendment grounds.

The judge previously had issued an order locking the wikileaks domain name--effectively shutting down the entire website--in response to a suit by Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss and Cayman Islands bank, over leaked banking records that had been posted to wikileaks.

The judge both rescinded the locking order and denied a motion to extend a TRO focused more narrowly on the bank documents--ruling that such injunctions, when applied to a website like wikileaks no less than to a newspaper, are impermissible “prior restraints” on protected speech. The judge also found that, due to defects in “subject matter” jurisdiction, the bank was unlikely to succeed in establishing that the case could be brought in federal court.

CFAC was instrumental in drawing attention to the wikileaks case and in organizing a legal assault on the court’s orders by public interest organizations and media companies.  CFAC itself intervened in the case together with Public Citizen (in DC).

You can see the court’s Feb. 29 opinion here.

Here are links to news stories on the most recent developments in the case.

-PS

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