Wikileaks.org Shut Down

For those not familiar with the site and its activities, Wikileaks is a website that acts as a forum for “whistle-blowers” who want to anonymously post government and corporate documents.

A California court ruling just shut it down after Swiss banking group Julius Baer filed a complaint against Wikileaks. According to the case “several hundred” private customer documents were posted regarding most of the bank’s offshore activities: those that connote involvement with money laundering and tax evasion. It’s an open secret that Swiss banks are used for fraudulent activities due to the lenient laws in the country. The said files were reportedly posted by a certain Rudolf Elmer which is a former vice president of the bank’s Cayman Island’s operation.

According to a BBC report Julius Baer asked for the files to be removed because they could have an impact on a legal case ongoing in Switzerland.

The website was taken offline after the California court ordered domain owner Dynadot to remove all texts and info of Wikileaks from its servers.

The order adds that Dynadot should also “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.”

Wikileaks claimed that the order was “unconstitutional” and said that the site had been “forcibly censored.” Due to the volatile nature of the revelations, users are given the option to post anonymously in the website. Unfortunately, the court order also demanded that “IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name” to be handed over.

The site was founded in 2006 by so-called dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from countries such as the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. According to site data, they have published more than 1.2 million documents of different topics and relevance.