Whistle-blowers have taken a blow. On Friday, a Web site that let tattletales publish sensitive information was closed on orders of a federal judge. The site, Wikileaks.org, launched last December and had more than 1.2 million documents posted anonymously.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in California ordered the injunction at the behest of a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, according to court documents. Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. and its subsidiary, Julius Baer Bank & Trust, said “immediate harm will result to (the bank) in the absence of injunctive relief.”

After an initial review of the complaint, 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 can undertake a closer review of the case.

Allegations of Tax Evasion

Wikileaks was developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis. The site cites its primary interests as Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but organizers hope to give people around the world a platform to reveal unethical behavior in governments and corporations.

Wikileaks has exposed rewards and penalties at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Yahoo’s lawsuit over a Chinese dissident’s jailing, a police raid on Burmuda Broadcasting, and thousands of other documents.

At the root of Julius Baer’s complaint were documents related to its offshore activities. According to the court order, those documents had titles that included phrases like “tax avoidance,” “offshore tax scheme,” and “tax evasion.” Wikileaks could not be reached for comment, but reportedly plans to continue publishing in other nations.

Is It Censorship?

According to Mark G. McCreary, an attorney with Fox Rothschild LLP in Philadelphia, the interesting story is that it…

Tags: information