Discourse.net

A US federal court has issued an (unprecedented?) order requiring an ISP to take down all DNS records pertaining to the “wikileaks.org” site.

I have not been able to find the full text of the order online, but at one of the wikileak mirror sites, they quote one of the operative paragraphs as follows:

Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.

The order was in the context of an ex parte hearing on a preliminary and emergency injunctive request from Bank Julius Baer of Switzerland which alleges that wikileaks is publishing secret bank information. (Some background on the dispute at USENET of all places.)

According to Wikinews, ‘Wikileaks.org’ taken off line in many areas after fire, court injunction,

The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion. The bank alleges the documents were disclosed to Wikileaks by offshore banking whistleblower and former Vice President the Cayman Island’s operation, Rudolf Elmer. Unable to lawfully attack Wikileaks servers which are based in several countries, the order was served on Wikileaks’s California registrar Dynadot (“the power company”). The order also enjoins every person who has heard about the order from from even linking to the documents,” said Wikileaks in the release.

I haven’t, however, been able to find the text of the order which says to whom it applies. This sealer order that’s being linked to all over the place is about something else much less interesting.

From the sound of it, the order I don’t have yet isn’t a classic prior restraint on speech since it reaches the registrar not the speaker — but it’s close enough to stopping the delivery trucks on a newspaper that I think this aspect of the decision is a cause for some serious First Amendment concern, as making speech accessible is a key part of speaking effectively. (The telephone analogy would be taking them out of the phone book.) Presumably the IP numbers for the site still work, though, so it’s not exactly like the Pentagon Papers either.

Much weirder is the suggestion that the injunction reaches us all, everywhere. On what theory does the district court think it has that jurisdiction? The news articles don’t tell us. Of course, since the matter was ex parte it possible that the court didn’t look as carefully at the order as it should have. Or that the news reports are leaving something out.

Please, does anyone have a pointer to the full text of the court’s order?

[UPDATE: See Wikileaks-Dynadot Order. I have found what I think is the relevant court order and it says NOTHING about enjoining “every person who has heard about the order from from even linking to the documents”.]