UBC profs denounce U.S. judge’s decision to shut down Wikileaks
Two UBC professors have expressed alarm at a U.S. judge’s decision to take a whistle-blowing Web site off the Internet.
On February 18, U.S. federal Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered that Wikileaks.org be shut down. Wikileaks is a Web site that allows users to post confidential documents anonymously on-line.
According to a BBC News report, White ordered that Wikileaks remove the relevant documents. The judge also ordered that Wikileaks’ domain registrar, Dynadot, take down the site, send back blank pages to users that try to access the site, and turn over information about the account holder.
UBC professor of computer science Richard Rosenberg claimed in a telephone interview that the move “didn’t make sense at all”. He said that White’s order for the site to be taken down amounted to an act of “prior constraint”, which could be interpreted as unconstitutional in the U.S. Furthermore, Rosenberg warned, the effect of the judge’s order could be “disastrous” for Internet users around the world, if it holds up on appeal.
“It means that you cannot put anything on your site, unless you can guarantee that that information is the truth, in some sense, or it doesn’t represent an attempt to defame or lie or so on,” he said.
Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor of journalism at UBC, told the Straight that he couldn’t recall previously seeing such an order. “Not in a democratic society,” he added.
Hermida compared the order for Dynadot to shut down Wikileaks with a court telling the Georgia Straight’s printers that they had to immediately cease printing the newspaper, simply because someone had complained about a particular article.
“I expect that on appeal, the decision won’t hold up, because it is a very wide-ranging judgment,” Hermida said. “So the issue here is: is it a case where the legal system hasn’t kept up with the technology and doesn’t understand its implications?”
According to a MediaPost Publications report, Wikileaks found itself in court after documents were posted on the site that purported to reveal money laundering and fraud by the Cayman Islands branch of Swiss bank Julius Baer. The bank claimed a disgruntled staffer had leaked the site false information.
Wikileaks is still available online at its IP address and through mirror sites hosted abroad. Since Judge White’s decision, the Julius Baer documents have become widely available through torrent downloads and remain online at Wikileaks’ IP address.
On February 18, U.S. federal Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered that Wikileaks.org be shut down. Wikileaks is a Web site that allows users to post confidential documents anonymously on-line.
According to a BBC News report, White ordered that Wikileaks remove the relevant documents. The judge also ordered that Wikileaks’ domain registrar, Dynadot, take down the site, send back blank pages to users that try to access the site, and turn over information about the account holder.
UBC professor of computer science Richard Rosenberg claimed in a telephone interview that the move “didn’t make sense at all”. He said that White’s order for the site to be taken down amounted to an act of “prior constraint”, which could be interpreted as unconstitutional in the U.S. Furthermore, Rosenberg warned, the effect of the judge’s order could be “disastrous” for Internet users around the world, if it holds up on appeal.
“It means that you cannot put anything on your site, unless you can guarantee that that information is the truth, in some sense, or it doesn’t represent an attempt to defame or lie or so on,” he said.
Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor of journalism at UBC, told the Straight that he couldn’t recall previously seeing such an order. “Not in a democratic society,” he added.
Hermida compared the order for Dynadot to shut down Wikileaks with a court telling the Georgia Straight’s printers that they had to immediately cease printing the newspaper, simply because someone had complained about a particular article.
“I expect that on appeal, the decision won’t hold up, because it is a very wide-ranging judgment,” Hermida said. “So the issue here is: is it a case where the legal system hasn’t kept up with the technology and doesn’t understand its implications?”
According to a MediaPost Publications report, Wikileaks found itself in court after documents were posted on the site that purported to reveal money laundering and fraud by the Cayman Islands branch of Swiss bank Julius Baer. The bank claimed a disgruntled staffer had leaked the site false information.
Wikileaks is still available online at its IP address and through mirror sites hosted abroad. Since Judge White’s decision, the Julius Baer documents have become widely available through torrent downloads and remain online at Wikileaks’ IP address.
Comments