Censorship of Wikileaks

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to ” lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar.”

Essentially, an employee for JBB went rogue and dumped hundreds of internal bank documents onto Wikileaks. These documents spell out tax-evasion and money laundering structures the bank maintained in the Cayman Islands. Again, these documents don’t suggest illegal activity, they show it, with names of persons and businesses involved.

Despite the shutdown, these documents are still readily available online. “Wikileaks continues to host the sensitive documents from servers located outside the U.S. Coincidentally, or not, the organization’s hosting center in Sweden was also struck by a denial-of-service attack, after which a fire erupted in the center as well.”

Just in case their servers face more ‘unfortunate’ incidents like these, I’ve chosen to host the documents on my server. You many download them here.

Wikileaks released a statement on the JBB matter Friday. It conveys my opinion as well:

When Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no-one was too surprised…And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand’s military Junta, no-one was too surprised…But on Friday the 15th, February 2008, in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”, the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown.