For those of us in the know, the site Wikileaks.org(.be / .de) is evidence for the positive and sanitizing power of the light of scrutiny. Wikileaks.org is a site dedicated to the world of whistle blowing, and provides a forum where parties can post damning documents for the world to review and judge.
The proof of the validity of the concept is the severity of the lawsuits it generates, like this one brought by Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss bank with offices in the Caymans that are, hold your breath here, playing a little fast and lose. Corruption in a Cayman Islands bank? Perish the thought, where will my drug fortune be properly laundered now?
Seriously though, someone posted internal documents revealing the corruption at the banking institution, and surprise the bank isn’t happy about it. Now, in order to prevent the spread of this information, they have obtained a temporary restraining order against the site. Now that isn’t to surprising, but what is surprising is the extent and basis of the order. You read more details about the case specifics here.
The order stipulates that the Domain Registrar for the site removal all evidence of the existence of the site by “locking the Wikileaks.org domain” and ” disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information.”. And it has worked, sort of. Wikileaks.org no longer functions.
But as so many companies have learned before, the Bank is learning the same lesson that the folks at MPAA and AACS LLC learned when attempting to suppress the decryption keys for HD-DVD. When you try to suppress things on the internet, all you do is speed up the viral nature of the information distribution by calling attention to it. When that storm hit, the key was spread to literally millions of locations.
Bank Julius Baer is learning the same lesson. As of this post, the alternate Wikileaks domains are still operating (as is the unresolved IP of the site, though it is running very slow right now), and news of the case is spreading throughout the technology press and intertubes. More people know about the site and the information now than before the lawsuit.
One other troubling aspect is the legal strategy being used to prevent the spread of the information. The law firm is using Copyright Law to claim the documents as copyrighted materials and not open to distribution. Of course, fair use would seem to trump in this case, but recent Republican led changes to US copyright law mean that this tact is being used more and more to fight the efforts of bloggers to reveal the dirty dealings of certain companies and individuals.
Interesting stuff.
