Court Attacks Free Speech

Los Angeles Times

A coalition of media and public interest organizations went to federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday urging a judge to reconsider his order to shut down a muckraking website that publishes leaked documents from businesses and government agencies worldwide.


Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White that two orders he issued last week against wikileaks.org were prior restraints that violated the 1st Amendment.


Laura Handman, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the news organizations, said White's order was so expansive that the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article.


"I can't think of another injunction that was so broad," said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that focuses on digital issues.


White acted in response to a lawsuit filed Feb. 6 by Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank, alleging that a disgruntled former employee had posted internal documents alleging money-laundering and tax evasion schemes at its Cayman Islands branch.


Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage "unethical behavior" by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


Julius Baer, represented by the Century City firm Lavely & Singer, past lawyers for several celebrities in battles with news organizations, alleged that the postings violated privacy and bank secrecy laws of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands and posed a serious threat of identity theft.