Groups Ask Judge to Reverse Order Shutting Down Wikileaks -- Updated

Several news organizations and public interest groups are going to battle on behalf of Wikileaks and the First Amendment. According to a story in the LA Times today, twelve media groups, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen, filed documents in federal court today asking Judge Jeffrey White to rescind an order he made two weeks ago.

The groups say the judge's orders constitute prior restraint, a violation of the First Amendment.

The judge had issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the domain registrar of Wikileaks.org, to disable the web site and prevent the domain from being transferred elsewhere after Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank with a branch in the Cayman Islands, filed a lawsuit to force Wikileaks to remove documents about the bank and its customers.

The documents, allegedly posted on the Wikileaks site by a former employee of the bank, purportedly suggest that the Cayman Islands branch helped customers launder money and hide assets. The bank wanted the documents removed because it claimed the publication of the documents violated privacy and bank secrecy laws in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

Judge White ordered Wikileaks to remove the documents, but rather than stop there, he also ordered Dynadot to disable Wikileaks' domain name.

The LA Times is among the coalition of 12 media groups that filed briefs saying Judge White went too far. The groups reiterate what a former Wikileaks attorney told me last week. Julie Turner, who has represented Wikileaks in the past but is not representing the organization on this issue, said that the judge's order was too broad and could be likened to a court shutting down an entire magazine or newspaper over a dispute involving a single article published in it.

As for Dynadot, an employee of the domain registration company called me yesterday to point me to a press release that Dynadot posted in response to the controversy. In the statement, the company seems to not want to take sides and says it was just doing what the court ordered it to do. But then it chastises the Julius Baer bank for asking the court to order it to shut down the Wikileaks site:

“This case raises First Amendment issues that are for the Courts to decide, not my client, Dynadot,” stated Garret D. Murai of Wendel, Rosen, Black & Dean, LLP, who represents Dynadot. “The only agreement by Dynadot was to comply with the Court’s previous order to preserve evidence, including preventing Wikileaks from transferring its domain name to another registrar and from changing its account settings – essentially, to preserve the status quo. Dynadot did not agree to remove the name server settings for wikileaks.org or to produce any information. This was requested by Julius Baer and granted by the Court.”
“It was explained to the Court that Dynadot only provides domain name registration services to Wikileaks. Dynadot is not the DNS provider nor is it the web host provider that maintains the content of wikileaks.org,” explains Kathryn Chow Han, in-house legal counsel for Dynadot. “Our company does not take a position on the merits of this litigation. However, if Julius Baer is concerned with the posting of its confidential documents on the wikileaks.org web site, it could have sought a more narrow remedy than seeking to have the entire wikileaks.org web site shut down.”

UPDATE: Paul Levy with Public Citizen, one of the groups that has asked Judge White to rescind his order, has responded to Dynadot's statement that it was only following orders.

"One may well feel sorry for a small domain name seller that got caught up in a huge case. But one reason that Internet users go to companies like Dynadot is to preserve their privacy, and when that privacy gets challenged it would seem to be at least implicit in the mutual expectations of the parties to that relationship is that the registrar will not simply roll over," he says. "Dynadot was IMMUNE from liability for what got done with the domain name, and it was up to Dynadot to raise that immunity. It would also have pointed out, as we do in the brief that we filed yesterday, that the Court had no jurisdiction of the case."

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