Dispatches

Wikileaks, a portal for anonymous publication of secret or suppressed documents was shut down yesterday by order of a San Francisco court judge. Apart from the First Amendment issues of such an order, the block is ineffective, taking down the wikileaks.org web address but not it’s IP address (the title of this blog post), allowing easy access with a bit more digging.

The block is due to a court injunction filed by lawyers representing Bank Julius Baer in order to stop the spread of internal documents showing what appears to be offshore tax evasion and money laundering by the bank on behalf of it’s clients. The judge, a Bush appointee, signed the order as drafted by the lawyers representing the bank with no amendments, and without a representative of Wikileaks present.