A Prior Restraint If Not For A Slight Misunderstanding

Not surprisingly, judges have not quite gotten a handle on this new fangled internet thing. Take for instance the injunction recently entered against the website Wikileaks. A Swiss bank named  Bank Julius Baer with a branch in the Cayman Islands filed suit against the website’s organizers in federal court in California and obtained a pair of emergency orders essentially shutting the domain name down. Wikileaks is a user-edited website whose purpose it is to post leaked documents from governments and private entities. It began through the efforts of Chinese dissidents who posted documents detailing government machinations  in an effort to help the reform movement. It has blossomed into a site that exposes the shameful acts of governments across the globe and has posted such documents as the Gitmo manual of operations.

The latest controversy involves the posting of what the bank believes are private documents of its customers posted by a whistleblower to expose allegedly shady transactions. The federal judge issued first a temporary then a permanent injunction shutting down the site. The orders can not be construed as anything but prior restraints which, since the Pentagon Papers case, were supposedly almost impossible to obtain.

The delicious irony is that neither the Judge nor presumably the bank’s counsel understood that a domain name is just layman’s language for a website’s ip address which is a series of numbers separated by periods. Bloggers quickly posted the numbers, 88.80.13.160, so everyone can still access the site.

So it goes

Alan Milstein