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Attempted censorship of wikileaks via the DNS
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:35:34 -0800
________________________________________ From: Steven M. Bellovin [smb () cs columbia edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:34 AM To: David Farber Subject: Attempted censorship of wikileaks via the DNS For IP, if you wish. There's a web site called -- past tense deliberate -- wikileaks.org. It hosts leaked documents of various sorts, and this offends some governments and corporations. According to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20wiki.html a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust, didn't was unhappy that a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign? provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws. Since wikileaks apparently feared some sort of court order, the site is hosted in Sweden on a site that has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn?t touch. It is perhaps the world?s least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is ?developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.? (from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/wikileaks-site-has-a-friend-in-sweden/) Accordingly, Julius Baer Bank got a court order against the site's DNS registrar, ordering them to delete wikileaks.org from the DNS. It's amazing that a federal judge would do something quite this blatant. It takes the whole web site off the air, including content that is quite clearly protected by the First Amendment. Even trying to censor particular articles is dubious, based on precedent; blocking the entire site clearly violates precedent; see, for example, http://www.news.com/Court-strikes-down-Pennsylvania-porn-law/2100-1028_3-5361999.html Not surprisingly, the NY Times article quoted the web site as noting the similarity of this case to the Pentagon Papers case. The Times also noted how ineffectual the censorship attempt actually was -- not only are there alternate names wikileaks.be, wikileaks.de, and wikileaks.cx -- but the site is still reachable via 88.80.13.160. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Attempted censorship of wikileaks via the DNS David Farber (Feb 20)