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Who We Are »
Betsy Combier

Help Us to Continue to Help Others »
Email: betsy.combier@gmail.com

 
The E-Accountability Foundation announces the

'A for Accountability' Award

to those who are willing to whistleblow unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status. They ask questions that need to be asked, such as "where is the money?" and "Why does it have to be this way?" and they never give up. These people have withstood adversity and have held those who seem not to believe in honesty, integrity and compassion accountable for their actions. The winners of our "A" work to expose wrong-doing not for themselves, but for others - total strangers - for the "Greater Good"of the community and, by their actions, exemplify courage and self-less passion. They are parent advocates. We salute you.

Winners of the "A":

Johnnie Mae Allen
David Possner
Dee Alpert
Aaron Carr
Harris Lirtzman
Hipolito Colon
Larry Fisher
The Giraffe Project and Giraffe Heroes' Program
Jimmy Kilpatrick and George Scott
Zach Kopplin
Matthew LaClair
Wangari Maathai
Erich Martel
Steve Orel, in memoriam, Interversity, and The World of Opportunity
Marla Ruzicka, in Memoriam
Nancy Swan
Bob Witanek
Peyton Wolcott
[ More Details » ]
 
CENSORSHIP: Whistleblower Site Wikileaks.org is Removed From the Internet For Informing the Public About Swiss Bank Activities
A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US. Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says. The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.
          
Published on Monday, February 18, 2008 by BBC News
LINK

Whistle-Blower Site Taken Offline
LINK

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after “several hundred” documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should “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.”

Other orders included that the domain name be locked “to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar” to prevent changes being made to the site.

Wikileaks claimed that the order was “unconstitutional” and said that the site had been “forcibly censored”.

Web names

The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank’s Cayman Island’s operation.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of “pending legal proceedings”.

The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland.

The court hearing took place last week and Dynadot blocked access from Friday evening.

Wikileaks says it was not represented at the hearing because it was “given only hours notice” via e-mail.

A document signed by Judge Jeffery White, who presided over the case, ordered Dynadot to follow six court orders.

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce “all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account”.

The order also demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and “IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name” to be handed over.

Wikileaks allows users to post documents anonymously.

Information bank

The site was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

It so far claims to have published more than 1.2 million documents.

It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net with many commentators questioning the motives of the people behind the site.

It recently made available a confidential briefing document relating to the collapse of the UK’s Northern Rock bank.

Lawyers working on behalf of the bank attempted to have the documents removed from the site. They can still be accessed.

Dynadot was contacted for this article but have so far not responded to requests for comment.

© 2008 BBC News

US court attacks web freedom; enjoins Wikileaks.org out of existence
Date: 2008-02-18
By Stephen Soldz, LINK

One of the most important web sites in recent months has been Wikileaks.org. Created by several brave journalists committed to transparency, Wikileaks has published important leaked documents, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq (see my The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq), the 2003 and 2004 Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya that apparently affected the Kenyan elections. Wikileaks has upset the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta.

Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers. It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet. The result was this totally unprecedented attempt to totally wipe out the existence of Wikileaks:

“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.”

There have, of course, been previous attempts by the U.S. Government and others to block publication of particular documents, most famously in 1971 when the Nixon administration attempted to stop publication by the New York Times of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. But trying to close down an entire site in this way is truly unprecedented. Not even the Nixon administration, when they sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, considered closing down the New York Times in response.

If this injunction stands, it will set an incredible precedent for all of us who use the web to unveil misbehavior by the rich and powerful. Fortunately, Wikileaks is fighting this unconstitutional attack on press freedom, aided by six pro bono attorneys in San Francisco. While Wikileaks has so far not issued any particular call for support, all who value freedom should stand ready to offer whatever support they need.

Meanwhile, Wikileaks still exists. Its founders, knowing that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, have created an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking the secrets of governments and the corrupt rich and powerful. Thus, everything is available at Wikileaks.be, among other names. Let the leaks continue!

This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 19 2008 on
p8 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 00:29 on February
19 2008.

An international website that claims to blow the whistle on corporate and governmental fraud vowed yesterday to defy attempts by a US court to close it down. Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to anonymously post documents in an attempt to expose corruption and wrongdoing. Its owners said yesterday that a Californian judge had ordered that the site be taken offline last week, after an injunction from a Swiss bank.

The bank, Julius Baer, sought the injunction to prevent claims being posted online that it was involved in money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. It has indicated that the information was prejudicial to an ongoing court case.
Last night, the version of the site hosted in the US remained unavailable, but duplicate sites hosted in India and Belgium were still accessible.

Information on the Wikileaks site led to a front-page Guardian story in August 2007, exposing money laundering in Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi, and in November the site published a confidential briefing memo from Northern Rock that was picked up by the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC.

The site published hundreds of pages of information from a former bank employee about the offshore activity of Julius Baer. Several documents allegedly relate to money laundering claims. The bank could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Last week a Californian district court judge, Jeffrey White, accepted the bank's injunction without amendment and also ordered Dynadot, the site's domain registry, to delete all record of the address from the central internet domain registry. Wikileaks' founders said the US court's move breached the first amendment.

Court puts kybosh on telltale site
Asher Moses
February 19, 2008 - 11:50AM

A controversial website providing a safe haven for whistleblowers seeking to upload confidential documents has been forced offline by a US court.

The Swiss bank Julius Baer sought an injunction against the Wikileaks site after it published documents purportedly showing shady offshore activities - including money laundering and tax evasion - allegedly supported by the bank in the Cayman Islands.

The site has also published millions of sensitive documents, including the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the primary operations manual for the running of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and evidence of involvement by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi, in a $US4.5 billion money laundering scheme.
But in a bizarre development that Wikileaks claims is unconstitutional, a court in California ordered the domain name registrar Dynadot to remove wikileaks.org from the internet completely.

And in a seemingly unrelated stroke of bad luck, the site's main servers in Sweden were hit by a fire and mass attacks over the internet, which sought to overload the site and take it offline.
The site, which counts Australians among its volunteers, remains offline but mirrored versions under different names such as wikileaks.be and wikileaks.de are still accessible. Ironically, the court order and subsequent media coverage have served only to increase interest in the documents, which can still be viewed online.

"Wikileaks 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,"
the site said on a mirrored version.

Julius Baer had argued that the documents should be removed because they could impact a separate legal case in Switzerland. The claims that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering were allegedly made by its former chief operating officer of the Cayman Islands branch.

US District Judge Jeffrey White, however, ordered the entire site be taken down as the bank would face "immediate harm" if it did not get "injunctive relief".

Wikileaks launched in 2006 and aims to uncover unethical behaviour by developing "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis". The site compares itself with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers that damaged the Nixon administration and eroded US public confidence in the Vietnam War.

A statement released by the site said that previous attempts by the Chinese Government and Thailand's military junta to censor Wikileaks were unsurprising, but the US injunction was "clearly unconstitutional".

The US constitution states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".

Censorship of this kind in the US is unprecedented and Wikileaks said it intended to fight the court order with its six San Francisco-based pro-bono lawyers.

"To find an injunction similar to the Cayman's case, we need to go back to Monday, June 15, 1971, when The New York Times published excerpts of Daniel Ellsberg's leaked 'Pentagon Papers' and found itself enjoined the following day," Wikileaks said in its statement.
"The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing the Times' printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power.

"The Supreme Court found the Times censorship injunction unconstitutional in a 6-3 decision."

 
© 2003 The E-Accountability Foundation