Comment: Federal District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District
in San Francisco, California, the judge who shut down Wikileaks.org in
the United States, secured his judgeship in 2002, an early appointment
by Bush 43.
For over 20 years, White taught a course in civil trial advocacy at
Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley Law School), but none of that concern for
legal niceties is present in his decision shutting down Wikileaks.
Instead of allowing book burning like the Nazis, White does the 21st
century equivalent, shutting down an information website with material
on it that the White House did not like.
Bank Julius Baer, which filed the complaint, is an anomaly, a Swiss
Bank run by members of the Baer Family, who are Jewish. When the
Swiss bankers were fighting in the 1990s to block payments to the
families of dead Jewish depositors, murdered by the Nazis, they picked
Hans J. Baer to be their point man in their unholy battle to hold onto
the deposits made by dead Jewish customers, a success story for 50
years, until the greedy bankers' house of cards collapsed.
Boalt School of Law has another distinguished professor with ideas the
Nazis would agree with, John Choon Yoo, who wrote the Bush
administration legal justification for using severe torture (up to
the point just before organ failure) in interrogations.
Maybe, like Yoo, Judge White is a member of the Federalist Society.
What uniform do Federalist Society members wear at meetings? Sorry,
another group has dibs on brown shirts.
As a final note, District Judge White shares two distinctions with
Jerry Seinfeld. Both are graduates of Queens College (CUNY) and both
are comedians, one intentionally, the other not (and not very funny
either).
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Last Updated: Monday, 18 February 2008, 16:20 GMT
Whistle-blower Site Taken Offline
The case was brought by lawyers working for a Swiss bank
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7250916.stm
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 site was founded in 2006
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.
