Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." Judge Jeffrey White in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

The Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss bank with a division in the Cayman Islands, took issue with documents that were published on Wikileaks by an unidentified whistleblower, whom the bank claims is the former vice president of its Cayman Islands operation, Rudolf Elmer. The documents purport to provide evidence that the Cayman Islands bank helps customers hide assets and wash funds.

After failing to convince Wikileaks to take down the documents, the bank went after its U.S. hosting service, which responded by agreeing not only to remove the Wikileaks account from Dyndadot's server but also to help prevent Wikileaks from moving its site to a different host.

Julie Turner, an attorney in California who represented Wikileaks prior to this latest litigation but is not counsel for the group on this matter, is surprised that the court sanctioned such a broad agreement.

"It’s like saying that Time magazine published one page of sensitive material so (someone can) seize the entire magazine and put a lock on their presses," she says.

Turner says she had been speaking with the bank last month on Wikileaks' behalf when the negotiations fell through.

"The bank wanted the documents taken down and Wikileaks was not prepared to do so. It was a pretty short negotiation," she says.

When the bank's lawyers indicated they would be filing a suit, she asked them to tell her where so that Wikileaks could find an attorney in the appropriate jurisdiction to represent it. She says the lawyers refused to tell her. Two and a half weeks later, the bank filed a restraining order against Dynadot and Wikileaks in San Francisco. Wikileaks received notice only a few hours before the case went to a judge who accepted the agreement between Dynadot and the bank.

Turner says that rather than trying to censor the information, the bank could have simply responded to the claims on the Wikileaks site. She also chastised the bank for not having better security over its documents.

"If you're dealing with banking records . . . if your bread and butter is confidentiality in banking, then you’d really better have mechanisms by which you can control documents. The bank itself should have had better security mechanisms rather than allowing employees to take electronic copies of things or make copies of things and remove them. That’s not Wikileaks' fault."

Despite the ruling, Wikileaks continues to host the sensitive documents from servers located outside the U.S. Coincidentally, or not, the organization's hosting center in Sweden was also struck by a denial-of-service attack, after which a fire erupted in the center as well. Attempts to reach Wikileaks to obtain more information were unsuccessful.

Calls to Dynadot for comment went unanswered.

UPDATE: Readers have asked for links to access Wikileaks. Cryptome has provided the bank documents in a convenient download. You can also view a mirror of the Wikileaks site or download a torrent of the Wikileaks archive. Alternatively, as a few readers have pointed out, you can still reach the original Wikileaks site by using this direct link to it.

Photo: Philip Brewer

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