February 18th, 2008
California court order effectively erases Wikileaks
In the rapidly escalating story of Wikileaks.org, (here) a California court has ordered the domain registrar, Dynadot, to erase all DNS entries for the domain, effectively erasing a website that hosts millions of documents purportedly “leaked” to the wiki-style site in the name of whistle-blowing on malfeasance. If you click on the above link you will note, however, that the site is not down of course.
And, in the meantime Cryptonome has made available a complete download of the documents that started all of this. Thoughts of Pandora’s box and cats escaping from bags leap to mind.
This is an outrageous move by a US court. They have attempted to destroy a website because of a complaint about a particular set of files. I wonder how they justify that? Luckily the Internet is made of a series of tubes and the DNS is only a small part of the plumbing.
Rumors abound of DDoS attacks against Wikileaks.org as well as a fire at their ISP. I am sure we have not heard the last of this.
Update: Cringely is outraged as well.
Richard Stiennon is an industry consultant. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
