Wikileaks taken offline
On Monday, the main site of Wikileaks was ordered to be taken offline by a California judge.
According to a press release from Wikileaks, which provides an anonymous, encrypted online document-hosting service for whistle-blowers, Wikileaks main site 'wikileaks.org' was taken completely offline by an order made by a Californian court to domain registrar Dynadot.
"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," stated the injunction.
The order, made by Judge White, came as a result of several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003, relating to Cayman Island's bank Julius Baer.
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 for its Cayman Island's operation, Rudolf Elmer.
According to Wikileaks, Judge White signed the order from Julius Baer lawyers "without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or Amicus" at the California Northern District Court in San Francisco on Monday.
While Wikileaks has six pro-bono attorneys in San Francisco who deal with legal cases, Wikileaks claims it was given only hours notice by email prior to the hearing. Wikileaks was not represented. Wikileaks pre-litigation California council Julie Turner attended the start of hearing in a personal capacity, but was then asked to leave the court room, Wikileaks claimed.
Wikileaks has backup servers in Belgium and Australia, but said it "never expected to use them."
Despite the injunction, Wikileaks stated that it will "keep on publishing, in fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."
Meanwhile, Wikileaks' main servers in Sweden have been "taken out" by a fire in the power supply. Immediately prior to the fire, Wikileaks suffered a sustained distributed denial of service attack.