California Judge Tries to Take Wikileaks Down: Hilarity Ensues
February 19th, 2008The imbecile judge cut one head off the monster and a thousand more sprang from the wound.
Despite forced takedown actions and DDOS attacks, Wikileaks is on the air: http://88.80.13.160. The server is located in Sweden.
(Of course, don’t expect the BBC to let you know that.)
Also, John Young, over at Cryptome, has provided a mirror of all the documents in question: Wikileaked Bank Julius Baer Documents 3MB zip
Funny note: After hunting down that IP address, I went to check Reddit and the Wikileaks IP was the number one story. I almost pissed myself laughing. So much for getting some “breaking news” out there on this issue.
Via: BBC:
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.
Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.
The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.
Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.
However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.
The court also ordered that Dynadot should “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.”
Other orders included that the domain name be locked “to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar” to prevent changes being made to the site.
Wikileaks claimed that the order was “unconstitutional” and said that the site had been “forcibly censored”.
Web names
The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.
The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank’s Cayman Island’s operation.
A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of “pending legal proceedings”.
The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland.
The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening.
Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was “given only hours notice” via e-mail.
A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.
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.
Wikileaks allows users to post documents anonymously.
Information bank
The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.
It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net with many commentators questioning the motives of the people behind the site.
It recently made available a confidential briefing document relating to the collapse of the UK’s Northern Rock bank.
Lawyers working on behalf of the bank attempted to have the documents removed from the site. They can still be accessed.
Dynadot was contacted for this article but have so far not responded to requests for comment.
I hope you start a ‘Hilarity Ensues’ tag.
Also, I’ve been grossly remiss in checking out cryptome.org. I keep coming across it, must be worth the monumental effort of clicking, eh?
This wikileaks story itself blows me away -I haven’t gotten to the docs themselves yet.
The idea of censoring the net is odd. I recall how efficiently courier groups back in the dial-in BBS days moved tons of stuff continuously day after day for years. We may worry about not knowing what we don’t know but it works both ways.
*blink blink*
…Now that I’ve visited it… -That is one hell of a site. Immensely reassuring somehow.
I have great gratitude for this post. And this site here itself; ever increasingly, daily, I appreciate your work more and more. On it’s own considerable merits to be sure but also in contrast to what else I find any elsewhere. Maybe I surf a pretty narrow and insulated milieu (most folks actually do, do they not?), as I likely do, but I know I can come here for the beef. Yes, I’ll stop embarrassing you now, and praps you don’t wish for much recognition, but I’m notably impressed. Thanks. Don’t ever stop topping yourself. Have a cookie! (And if you don’t post this comment, it’s quite alright, I wouldn’t be surprised, or take it wrong.)
The line
“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.”
seems to be the key.
@zuma
“This” all started with me during the BBS days. I was really into tfiles back then… And other…activities.
Have you seen this?
http://bbsdocumentary.com/
haha
I’ve been watching bits and pieces of it online. Wow. Those were the days.
Sorry for being sooooo off topic, but it’s pretty rare to find anyone who was into BBSes.
Whenever I see news of censorship attempts like these, my first action is to find out if the info is still available somewhere, then download the whole thing, and put up torrents and start seeding.
You can get whole websites easily as well with the right download tools, then convert the site to local links and package and start seeding ..
Ive noticed there are plenty of people like me, which delights me really 🙂
And heres the torrent for the whole 250 mb zip of WikiLeaks, a dated mirror snapshot of the site:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4034919/WikileakS.org_mirror_archive_%20Feb_10th_2008%20#21878496680559967997
And update packages to the mirror file:
http://wikileaks.bluenorway.org/
For anyone interested..
kevin,
oh how cool was this!
(is boardwatch even still being published?)
yes, those were the days.
i began on the commodore C-64 boards then moved up to crash&burn, run on an amiga 500, running C-Net, which the sysop/owner Dave Rankin significantly helped develop. He had it tweaked superbly. Dave also had access to a net backbone and delivered newsgroups packets and email even regularly. so i had an internet email addy before i even saw the net. it was through that i first began receiving eric margolis’s newsletter. his newsletter had a lovely piece of ascii art at top of the earth.
my own thing was art which was a quirky endeavor given it wasn’t displayed inline of course. and then we had the ansi artists in our crew, and the programmers, which i dabbled with via asic and some good additional asic libraries. we would’ve killed for a good demo progger. —those were the days one could really get one’s hands on the lowlevel guts of one’s machine and make it do damn near anything. and that’s how it should be. my last x86 box was a 586, best of all worlds. it could run w95 but still be viable as a 16bit machine for real play. i lost it this past summer…
i dunno if i’ve tossed you my oldzepp folder url or not and it sounds like i have but if i haven’t:
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/oldzepp/ZZ000029.GIF
(i think i have already… pardon.)
anyway, i love this url you tossed me and the one it holds. thank you immensely.
ye gods, a lost universe recovered in it’s entirety…
…but i gotta admit, for what we have now, the trade-off was worth it. even if only in escaping obscurity -or we wouldn’t be holding this conversation…
My first computer was a C64 as well, in 1983. After that came Atari ST, IBM 8088, various machines after that..
I built accessories for the C64, like a thermometer card and a program that printed temperature values and a daily graph with a plotter..
Nowadays Linux satisfies all my needs what comes to dabbling with the internals of my computers. I really love being able to congigure everything I want the way I want it, and the idea of using a system born out of the collective labors of thousands of individuals working for a common goal out of enlightened self-interest 🙂 The same idea should be applied to all culture and human endeavor.