Judge Shutters Whistle-Blower Site; Major 1st Amend. Issue

In a move that could spark a major test of the scope of the First Amendment in the Internet era, a federal judge in San Francisco has closed down a website with a mission of providing a bulletin board for the posting of leaked material.

A permanent injunction (PDF posted by New York Times) granted Friday by District Judge Jeffrey S. White still leaves several "back doors" to the Wikileaks site open to sophisticated users. But the judge's order requiring the domain name registrar to disable the site's "front door" domain name could result in a major First Amendment challenge, according to the New York Times.

Disabling the entire site is “clearly not constitutional,” David Ardia, of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, tells the newspaper. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire website.”

The judge's order came in a case brought by a Cayman Islands bank which contends in court filings that stolen documents have been provided to Wikileaks by “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign,” violating both a confidentiality agreement and banking law. The judge also ordered the domain registrar and Wikileaks to stop distributing the bank documents. Lawyers for both could not be reached by the newspaper for comment.

Meanwhile, in apparent reaction to the judge's move, other "fans of the site and its mission rushed to publicize" alternate addresses that can be used to access the Wikileaks site and have "also distributed copies of the sensitive bank information on their own sites and via peer-to-peer file sharing networks," the Times reports.

The article also says that "the feebleness of the action suggests that the bank, and the judge, did not understand how the domain system works or how quickly Web communities will move to counter actions they see as hostile to free speech online."