Wikileaks Will Get Its Domain Name Back

The same judge who originally ordered Wikileaks taken down has seen the light, and has reversed his decision. Apparently the 10 lawyers representing various organizations such as the Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pounded the First Amendment into his brain.

You'll recall that this all started when a case was brought against Wikileaks by lawyers representing the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. A number of documents were posted on Wikileaks that allegedly disclosed that the bank was connected to money laundering and tax evasion. Julius Baer requested the documents to be taken down because they could affect the outcome of a separate legal case in Switzerland.

Judge Jeffrey White held a hearing to reconsider his initial decision because federal law required it, and because he was rethinking your decision. "There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment," he said.

White did take some time to address criticism against his initial ruling at the start of the hearing; perhaps more for we reporters than for the interested parties.

"The parties need to understand, and those in this courtroom need to understand, the status of this case. This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties, and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit ... nobody filed any timely responses to the court's order."

None of which made any sense to me, First Amendment-wise, but OK.

Lifting the injunction in his ruling today, White said:

"There are serious questions of prior restraint and possible violations of the First Amendment. The court has serious questions whether those concerns raised before the court make the granting of the relief requested by the plaintiffs constitutionally appropriate.

Now that, I understand. Muzzling Wikileaks as he did was unconstitutional, he's saying. Note that the Julius Baer case against Wikileaks has not been dismissed, just the injunction against it.

The site itself wasn't down, if you recall, it was just the DNS server entries that pointed to it. Once Dynadot, the domain name registrar in question, restores those entries, it will take some time to propagate globally, but once it does, wikileaks.org will be reachable again.

For now, if you want, you can still reach it via this link or different country URLs, such as .be.