WHDb

A First Amendment case concerning a Web site occurred in February 2008, and that case brought several points to light. The case was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust, against Wikileaks.org, a site that hopes to reveal unethical behavior in governments and institutions through leaked materials posted on the site. According to the New York Times, “Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.”

But, anyone who harbors a modicum of Web savvy knows that shuttering a front door to a Web site is a futile effort, as there are other ways to keep a site ‘live.’ In the Wikileaks.org case, users could continue to gain access to the site through its Internet Protocol (IP) address and through mirror sites registered in other countries that the Wikileaks.org organizers created for such a circumstance. Those domain names were not affected by the injunction. Additionally, David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, stated that Judge White’s order to disable the entire site was not constitutional, and that “there is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site.” Read the rest of this entry »