[Cmi-brasil-editorial] [pauta] 'Wikileaks.org' taken off line in many areas after fire, court injunction

[ggus em riseup.net]

February 18, 2008

The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the
world. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to leaking documents that are
"anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable."

Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which
was followed by a fire which took out the main servers hosting the site in
Sweden, and a restraining order on the domain name 'WikiLeaks.org' issued
in the United States.

According to the website HongPong.com, Wikileaks experienced "a 500Mbps
distributed denial of service attack" before the fire, but it is not known
if the DDoS attack is connected to it.

After the attack, a fire was reported in the Uninterruptible Power Supply
of the servers which host the site.

The third and final factor taking the site off line is a permanent
injunction granted in the California Northern District Court in San
Francisco, California to Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss Bank, which has caused
the domain to be taken off line in the U.S.. Wikileaks previously
published hundreds of documents obtained from a whistleblower of the Swiss
Bank, "purportedly showing offshore tax evasion and money laundering by
extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive, clients from
the US, Europe, China and Peru."

According to a Wikileaks press release received by e-mail, the injunction
issued by the court states, "Dynadot [Wikileaks host] shall immediately
clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name
and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or
any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further
order of this Court."

"The order was entirely written by Cayman Island's Bank Julius Baer
lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or
representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks
articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The
documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for
asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the
documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower
and former Vice President the Cayman Island's operation, Rudolf Elmer.
Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several
countries, the order was served on Wikileaks's California registrar
Dynadot ("the power company"). The order also enjoins every person who has
heard about the order from even linking to the documents," said Wikileaks
in the release.

Despite the injunction, Wikileaks states that they will "keep on
publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case,
Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or
unethical banking practices."