Amid ongoing controversy, Swiss bank Julius Baer has dropped its lawsuit against whistle-blower Web site Wikileaks.org. In a filing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Julius Baer dismissed the lawsuit against Wikileaks and the site’s registrar, Dynadot. The bank offered no explanation and officials were not immediately available for further comment.

Constitutional Furor

The drama began shortly after the bank filed a complaint against Wikileaks and Dynadot for posting leaked documents. After an initial review, Judge Jeffrey White ordered Dynadot, a California Web-hosting company, to “immediately clear and remove” records from Wikileaks and “prevent the domain name from resolving to the Wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank page” until he could undertake a closer review.

The judge and the bank quickly became the focus of international controversy as free-speech and civil-rights groups charged the decision was unconstitutional.

Wikileaks allows anonymous posting of documents, including those disclosing U.S. Army operations at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba; human-rights abuses in China; and political corruption in Kenya. But a new look at First Amendment law began when documents from the Swiss bank showed up.

Bank Warned

In the face of widespread media attention and rights-groups action, White last week reversed his decision. Dynadot had already blocked the Wikileaks.org domain name, but the site remained alive on other servers and could even be reached using its numerical address.

The bank dropped the suit after a warning that Wikileaks, Dynadot and the intervening defendants, including Public Citizen and the California First Amendment Project, could seek attorney fees under a California law designed to protect those who speak out against meritless lawsuits, according to Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy.

“Although the bank’s notice of dismissal warns of the possibility that the bank may bring the same lawsuit in some different court, we are confident that…