[IP] Attempted censorship of wikileaks via the DNS

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
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

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