A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.
(The above was quoted from Wikipedia. )
Wikileaks.org follow the model of Wikipedia but now the powers that be suddenly found what happens when the collaborative power of whistle blowers that nowadays have harder access to the corporate media get into the act.
So when a swiss bank preferred by the mega wealthy found themselves having documents that show evidence of money laundering in the Cayman islands in Wikileaks.org, the bank did not investigate the evildoers, they found it was better to shut down Wikileaks.org:
While this is good now, it is disturbing to me that this judge was given very bad advice at the beginning or he just plainly showed incompetency, what do the legal eagles in the SDMB think? What the judge did was justified? (This goes for the shutdown as well as the reversal.)
And, it is ok for corporations to make the point that privacy protection laws triumph over free speech laws? What if the right of the state to prosecute fraud is being affected?
I can’t say that I’ve thought about this well enough to make a well informed opinion on the site. At first glance, it’s very well put together and provides a great wealth of information already. I’ll have to mull it over for a while.
That said, I can probably give you a good indicator of my feelings. I’m all about promoting transparency. That said, I think it’s difficult to judge the site as a whole; but rather, each document posted is going to have its own moral pros and cons.
Free speech doesn’t give you the right to violate the law. Presumably, the original request for an injunction asserted that wikileaks.org was violating a law by posting the documents in question. It appears that wikileaks.org managed to convince the judge that they were doing no such thing.
My take on it is that wikileaks.org had incompetent, or at the least, uncompetent legal help at the time of the first hearing on the injunction. Once they were able to obtain competent legal help, they were able to establish that the arguments originally presented to the judge were not sufficient to establish the right to an injunction. There is a specific rubric a judge uses to determine if an injunction will issue. Obviously, at the first hearing, wikileaks.org failed to convince the judge that the rubric shouldn’t result in an injunction.
A federal judge isn’t expected to know all the law on all things. That’s why the parties offer legal arguments in support of their requests. The bank’s lawyers provided the basis for an injunction in their petition and subsequent filings, probably supplemented by things said at the time of the first hearing on their request. These were sufficient to establish that an injunction should issue temporarily. Among the things they would have had to show are: likelihood of success on the merits of their claim and “irreparable harm” if the activity to be enjoined continues. You can read the basics at Wikipedia: Preliminary Injunction. So, no, not an incompetent judge.
Yes, but on both the balance of harm and the public disservice arguments, I fail to see how completely shutting the site down is justifiable. Why not just order the documents removed?
AFAIK the incompetent or uncompetent (is that a word?) was caused by the very nature of the wiki, as dissidents and contributors have sometimes very good reasons to remain in hiding.
It looks to me that the bank lawyers saw that weakness and did use it to their advantage.
AFAIK the incompetent or uncompetent (is that a word?) legal help was caused by the very nature of the wiki, as dissidents and contributors have sometimes very good reasons to remain in hiding.
It looks to me that the bank lawyers saw that weakness and did use it to their advantage.
It’s quite possible that no one showed up on behalf of wikileaks.org at the first hearing. I’ve not delved into the whole mess to see. If no one showed, the judge will be inclined to grant the request of the petitioner unless it’s clearly unwarranted.
From what I read, that was just the case. Apparently due in part to the wiki nature of the site, there was trouble at first determining just who was supposed to show up and claim to be the responsible person/s and put up a defense.
I think it’s pretty clear that Wikileaks did not have adequate counsel at the outset. However, it does seem surprising to me that the judge would not have general awareness of the significant First Amendment implications of the injunction. This is not a highly specialised are of the law.
The judge did not shut down the site. What he did was a lot less effective: He ordered the company that sold Wikileaks their wikileaks.org domain name to remove the name from their records and, therefore, effectively limit access to the site to people who knew the numerical IP address. It’s more or less equivalent to the judge ordering a phone book company to remove the listing of a certain group’s phone number. The phone number still works, but you have to use some other way of finding it.
Needless to say, the Wikileaks IP address became an instant Internet celebrity. It’s amazing how quickly a string of four little numbers can spread through sites like Digg and Reddit. The Streisand Effect works.
I’d like to question the premise that the issue is ‘freedom to money laundering’. My suspicion is that Julius Baer (the plaintiff) have been boneheaded in presenting their case, at least to the public.
On perusing some documents on the wikileaks.org site (it is accessible again) it seems that at least most of the content is not whistleblowing but kookery.
For example, this document (purportedly a letter from Julius Baer to German Chancellor Angela Merkel) is, from internal evidence, a really amateurish fake. This (purportedly an internal German military memo - no internal evidence against that that I can see) about organizational matters of the German component of a NATO force is so sinister and secret that it’s even been cc:ed to the offices of the Protestant and Catholic military bishops :smack:
On whistleblowing and money laundering: I’d expect someone with real documents on criminal activity to send them to the relevant prosecutors’ office(s), someone with fake documents to post it on such a site instead.