Bank Drops Wikileaks.org Lawsuit

John C Abell, March 6, 2008

The Swiss bank which obtained an injunction that “shut down” wikileaks.org – before the judge decided his ruling was probably unconstitutional – has now withdrawn the case.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Julius Baer and Co. reserves to pursue the case “at a later date in the same court or elsewhere.” Right.

US District Judge Jeffrey White’s original order was widely ridiculed as wrong on the law -- he ordered an entire publication shut down in a dispute over a single article -- and “feeble” – disabling “wikileaks.org” had zero impact on the public’s ability to access documents on the site and thus showed tremendous naïveté about the domain system.

White overruled himself two weeks later. "There are serious questions of prior restraint and possible violations of the First Amendment," he announced from the bench Feb. 29. "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 the plaintiff has backed off  the reset button has been hit, everyone is back in their corners, and a frontal assault on press freedom has been swiftly averted.

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