What is Wikileaks.org and why is a Swiss bank trying to silence it?

Wikileaks.org is a new-style whistle-blower site that collects damning details -- from classified documents to internal memos -- that purport to demonstrate a big company or government is involved in some form of malfeasance. The identities of the whistle-blowers are kept secret so as to promote more Enron-style disclosures.

Perhaps I should be referring to the whistle-blowing wiki in the past tense. A California judge ordered it removed from the Net late last week. The judge ruled in favour of Swiss banking group Julius Baer who took the site's operators to court after it found several hundred classified documents dealing with its off-shore operations on the site.

In an extremely rare decision, the judge ordered the site operator, Dynadot, to not only disable the URL, but to wipe any copy of the site off its servers.

But this is the Internet. The site is already popping up elsewhere, hosted by sympathetic souls who want to see it live on another day and who don't fall under jurisdiction of the California courts. You can visit it here.
Meanwhile, in taking the case to court international attention is now focused on Julius Baer. What could this bank have done that it wants to silence a small group of activists?

Comments

[Brittany Mayne]

Great post. This is an interesting subject that raises a lot of questions about internet free speech, and corporate accountability.