The Wardman Wire

The Spy Blog are reporting that Wikileaks (dead link at time of writing: Sun 17 Feb 8am GMT) has been partially closed down by a restraining order issued by court in California. From Wikipedia:

Wikileaks is a website running on modified MediaWiki software which allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, allegedly without possible retribution. It claims that postings are untraceable by anyone attempting to do so. It was launched in December 2006 and, as of November 2007, had contained over 1.2 million documents

I have summarised the article from the Spy Blog below.

The Key Points

• As I said above, Wikileaks publishes aims to publish documents anonymously for whistleblowers.
• This was the site which hosted the leaked UK National Identity Scheme document annotated by NO2ID. Guido published some points at the time.quotes at the time. That document is still available here.
• The domain WikiLeakS.org is no longer online, due to a Temporary Restraining Order issued by the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, aimed at a Domain Name Registrar, rather than just the actual publishers of controversial material, who happen to be outside of US legal jurisdiction.
• The plaintiffs in the California case are a Swiss Bank bank - Bank Julius Baer.
• There is a published list at the Wikileaks blog of around 30 alternative domains for accessing the Wiki Leaks service. This morning I checked and most of these links are still accessible.
• WikiLeakS.org have also had legal threats in the past from our friends at Schillings. Schillings are acting against WikiLeaks.org because of their publication of a prospectus to potential rescue investors of the Northern Rock plc bank scandal, something which is now obsolete, but was of interest to all UK taxpayers and investors.

• See the Censorship Threats from Lawyers category archive of blog postings on the WikiLeak.org blog, which comments on the technical, legal and ethical aspects of the WikiLeakS.org project.

Read the article on Spy Blog for all the information.

[Update 10:30am]

My Thoughts

One of Spy Blog’s comments looks at how threats to Internet infrastructure are a fruitful channel for those attempting to restrict Internet content:

Even if such companies win in court, the expense of kegal advice is such that it could cost them far more money in legal fees, than they are getting from a cheap domain name registration or webhosting package, so they are tempted to cave in to such shyster demands for censorship.

My preferred analogy would be threatening a library for including a book you don’t like.

In the UK, infrastructure companies (such as Fasthost in the Usmanov case) face a potential business risk from losing the litigation, which outweighs the actual business benefit from the service they are supplying to the allegedly offending client. Therefore business logic leads to the closing down of the relationship with the client, and a loss of freedom of expression. This is what must change.

To remain safe, you need to make sure that no stage of the “referral chain” to your website can be threatened, and that includes the Domain Name Server (DNS) as well as the webhost itself.

Those wanting to be thoroughly pseudonymous need to apply exactly the same process, and even then it will not be perfect.