"Something is in the air these days because in two separate cases, federal court judges have issued rulings that do some damage to the First Amendment right to free speech. In the first case Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Federal District Court in San Francisco issued last week what the Citizen Media Project calls a "stunningly broad injunction" against web site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks says it's an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," and has actively published a number of purloined documents submitted to it, including the secret censorship lists of Thailand's military Junta and files that purported to expose money-laundering by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi.

This go-around Wikileaks published documents regarding a Cayman Islands bank Julius Baer Bank and Trust Company. Julius Baer asked first for a temporary restraining order against Wikileaks and then received a permanent injunction against the web site because, it argued, a disgruntled ex-employee has provided the site with stolen documents that violate a confidentiality agreement and banking laws. Judge White issued an order not to the site itself but to Wikileaks domain registrar Dynadot to disable the entire Wikileaks.org domain name and account and remove all DNS hosting records."

Labels: censorship, collusion, corruption