Wikileaks Ordered Back

Wikileaks.org is the site that blows the whistle on any corporate malpractice, or at least that's what it alleges itself to be. On the 14th of February, it was forced to shut down its primary domain after the Swiss Bank Julius Baer & Co had filed a complaint against it. Copies of documents showing that the bank helped customer launder money illegally, through the Cayman Islands, were leaked onto the site, and that started the entire charade.

The judge hammering down the sentence on Wikileaks is having second thoughts about his original sentence after being put under a lot of pressure by civil libertarians around the world and this constituency in the United States. Judge White said that his original judgment raised "serious questions of prior restraint (on speech) and possible violations of the First Amendment," as reported by PC World.

Julius Baer & Co came around and claimed that the leaking of the documents harmed privacy rights. That's a bit of a mind puzzler, how can it be a privacy problem as long as the documents are said to be false, gross forgeries? Shouldn't that fall under calumny? Either way, the bank issued a press statement saying that: "It is not and has never been Julius Baer's intention to stifle anyone's right to free speech. Indeed, Julius Baer has specifically made no attempt to remove material on the website which refers to the organization but which does not include information personal to its customers."

It looks like a legal jungle getting ready for yet another guerilla war. There is no way any of the two claims can be found to be more important than the other, because each stands for a basic human right and there's no way either can take precedence. Judge White, in his parting shot on the case, said that there is a "definite disconnect between the evolution of our constitutional jurisprudence and modern technology."