Photo by Shht! on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
It was inevitable, given the nature of the site, that the 'whistleblowing service' Wikileaks would find itself the subject of a legal injunction.
From the start, the site had readied itself by setting up servers in Belgium and India as well as the US but, as they said yesterday, they "never expected to be using the alternative servers to deal with censorship attacks from, of all places, the United States".
The site was shut down by California district court judge Jeffrey White after Swiss investment bank Julius Baer issued an injunction; the site had publishing several hundred pages of information that alleged the bank was involved in money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. The information was posted anonymously on Wikileaks - the site's modus operandi - but is believed to be from a former employee who is the subject of a court case.
But the decision to close the entire site - and even to order that the site's name be deleted from the official web domain registry - has been met with astonishment.
A spokesperson for Wikileaks told me it was not clear whether the injunction was related to an anonymous denial of service attack on the site last year, but alleged the documents at the heart of the injunction concerned a former employee.
"The whistleblower in question filed a criminal suit in Zurich last year over car chases, of which there was at least one police record, by the banks private investigators, so anything is possible when dealing with this bank and their ultra-rich clients who pay a lot of money to stay out of the light."
And a spokesman for Julian Baer could not comment, beyond saying that "legal proceedings are underway so they cannot make any further statement at this stage".
Wikileaks has to prove it can keep Julius Baer's information offline
I spoke to Joseph Rosenbaum, a specialist in technology and media law and partner at Reed Smith in New York, who told me that no judge - particularly in California - would have taken that decision lightly. Rosenbaum suspects that the contents of those documents were contentious enough that he was seriously convinced that irrevocable harm would have been caused by the release of that information. The toothpaste would have been out of the tube, as he put it, and went on to describe the unstoppable spread of viral information.
"As a general rule, absent some behaviour or conduct by the website, an innocent site that merely provides a forum for the content posted by others is general immune from direct ultimate liability in the US - in the same way a newsstand would be.
"This lends greater credence to my assumption that it is the nature of the documents themselves and the content involved, that likely would have led the judge to order an ex-parte injunction in this manner."
As for ordering the URL to be removed - that shows the court considering how likely it was that the site could effectively remove all the documents relating to Julius Baer without leaving any links or access to archived material if the rest of the site was left up. Wiping out the whole site was the only way to ensure that, they seem to have thought.
Wikileaks will launch a multi-pringed attack, he predicts, firstly going after the sacred principle of free speech and the first amendment.
Secondly, they will also try to demonstrate that there were and are alternative methods of removing that content without ditching the whole site.
And perhaps the contents, and therefore the controversial nature, of those documents will come out in the wash.
Wikileaks is still up
Strangely, Wikileaks is still accessible at its DNS address - http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks, if not through wikileaks.org. There will be more to come.
