The latest stage in the ongoing saga of Julius Baer v. Wikileaks was to take place Friday dawn as a federal judge considered whether to extend a temporary injunction against the whistle-blowing Web site.

The case started in early February when the Swiss banking conglomerate Julius Baer asked the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to take down the Wikileaks.org domain. Baer said Wikileaks had posted “stolen and forged bank records” provided by a “disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign.”

Wikileaks says the documents are five to 10 years old and show the bank was setting up shell structures to funnel money through the Cayman Islands.

Judicial Freak-Out

Judge Jeffrey White issued a “ex parte” permanent injunction requiring Wikileaks’ domain registrar, DynaDot, to “disable the wikileaks.org domain name” and prevent it from pointing to any Web site other than a “blank park page.” The judge plus issued a temporary

restraining order against Wikileaks itself, blocking it from “displaying, posting, publishing, distributing, linking to” or providing knowledge on how to access the documents.

Wikileaks — which says it is “developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” — protested that the injunctions amounted to “prior restraint” of the press — the most offensive restriction of the First Amendment. Wikileaks compared the court’s orders to injunctions against The New York Times in the landmark Pentagon Papers case. These orders are the “equivalent of forcing the Times’ printers to print blank pages and its ability company to turn off press capability,” it said.

Hardly, said Eric Goldman, director of Santa Clara University Law School’s High-Tech Law Center. “I would put it in the bucket of judicial freak-out, but we run into those every day,” Goldman said in a telephone interview. “This is a judge who just doesn’t like…

Original post by Top Tech News