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Quote:From government to big business, if you have a dirty secret, Wikileaks is your nightmare. David Leigh and Jonathan Franklin on the site a US court has tried to muzzle

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

The Julius Baer bank in Zurich succeeded in hamstringing the shadowy individuals behind the website by the simple trick of moving not against them, but against a US company that hosted their domain name.

Dynadot, the California resellers who collect a few dollars by this internet trade, submitted to a legal injunction ordering the name to be deleted. Yet however wise this scheme may have appeared at the time to the Swiss bank's Los Angeles lawyers, Lavely & Singer, it has now backfired in a big way...

Quote:Wikileaks.org won a reprieve Friday from a judge's order that had shut down its U.S. site for a week. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White lifted the injunction he had previously imposed to keep the site from spreading possible trade secrets. He issued the new ruling after he heard a fresh round of arguments Friday...

Before Friday's Wikileaks hearing, the ACLU said it planned to argue that the original order failed to consider the public interest. "The public has a right to receive information and ideas, especially ones concerning the public interest," said Aden Fine, a senior staff attorney with the organization's First Amendment Working Group...

Quote:Swiss bank Julius Baer, facing an international backlash, defended on Thursday taking legal action to shut down a website that published what the site said were details of secret bank accounts linked to tax- avoidance schemes...

"It is not and never has been Julius Baer's intention to stifle anyone's right to free speech," Baer said in a statement. "The posting of confidential bank records by anonymous sources significantly harms the privacy rights of all individuals."...

Baer made the statement as free speech advocates worldwide accused the bank of censoring a website...