US court orders Web site blocked for Americans
The United States has blocked Americans’ access to an entire Web site.
Really.
Wikileaks is a site where whistleblowers can anonymously post information and documents showing their companies or governments are engaged in illegal activities.
In one case, Rudolf Elmer, former COO of the Swiss banking group Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands operation, posted such documents purporting to show that the bank was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. The bank’s lawyers convinced Judge Jeffery White of California (still trying to find out which court specifically) to order that the site’s domain registrar, Dynadot, remove the site’s hosting records.
In plain English, that means that if you try to go to wikileaks.org, your computer won’t know where that is. Try it. The Wikileaks people weren’t even given enough notice to appear at the hearing.
Wow.
And, according to the BBC,
As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account".
The order also demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name" to be handed over.
But you can still access the site easily — you just have to go to one of the alternative Wikileaks sites, such as
or
or go to the IP address directly.
http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
Read the text of the injunction. (PDF)
Read the documents that are the cause of the hubbub.
