From Wikileaks

THOMAS ELIAS
Tuesday March 11, 2008

In the beginning, it looked like an utter disaster for the First Amendment, whose guarantees of freedom of speech and press have protected Americans from prior restraint since the Bill of Rights was adopted almost 230 years ago.

But the unified defense of an obscure Web site by mainstream media and other free-press advocates instead turned around a case that could have set a pernicious precedent for squashing information governments and corporations don't want the public to see.

This case became dangerous when a federal judge in San Francisco last month ordered the shutdown of a U.S. Web site called Wikileaks.org, which claims to have posted 1.2 million leaked government and corporate documents to the Internet, all tending to expose unethical or illegal behavior. Among items it has exposed are copies of a 2003 operations manual for the U.S. terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The site ran afoul of Judge Jeffrey White after the Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer & Co. filed a lawsuit claiming a disgruntled executive fired for "misconduct" stole documents and posted them on Wikileaks, exposing the bank's operation in the Cayman Islands to allegations of money laundering and helping tax evasion schemes.

That, of course, seemed plausible because many other proven tax evasion schemes have laundered money through the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean and Swiss points.

The incredibly credulous White ordered Wikileaks shut down by his hosting company, San Mateo-based Dynadot, and Dyandot said it would comply. His injunction sought to impose prior restraints on both Wikileaks and Dynadot, something U.S. appeals courts have almost never upheld outside times of declared war. Prior restraints imposed by the British on colonial newspapers and pampleteers, in fact, were one cause of the American Revolution. They come when a government orders material suppressed before publication, whether or not it knows what might be published. Valid remedies for publication of false or malicious information, of course, are post-publication libel and slander actions, not fishing expeditions aimed at stopping embarrassing news stories.

Free press groups and activists did not meekly accept White's injunction, even though Wikileaks is hardly a part of the traditional media associated in many minds with First Amendment protections.

"Wikileaks' silencing was sought by antidemocratic governments worldwide -- including China, whose censors work mightily to block all access to the site," said Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition. "Wikileaks' plug was pulled, ironically, (not in China) but by a federal judge in San Francisco."

From Indianapolis came an outcry from the Society of Professional Journalists, which quickly submitted a friend of the court brief opposing the injunction along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Scripps Howard Newspapers, The Associated Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gannett Co. (publishers of USA Today and more U.S. newspapers than any other firm) and the Newspaper Association of America. The challenge, thus, came from virtually the entire newspaper industry.

It was clear to most lawyers from the moment Judge White issued his injunction that the order would not stand long. Apparently, it didn't take the judge long to realize this, either.

For less than a week after he issued his prior restraint order shutting down Wikileaks, the site was back up with the Bank Julius Baer documents as its lead links. The site declares upfront that it is "developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis." Just what governments and many corporations don't want and just what the public often needs.

In response to all the motions and friend of court briefs filed by the media and public interest coalition aroused by his ruling, White reversed field and lifted his injunction before any appeals court got the chance to do it for him.

He acknowledged in open court that his order had led to questions about "a possible violation of the First Amendment." As a teenager might put it, "Well, duh."

The real question here is how an American judge -- any American judge -- could be blind enough to believe the interests of a foreign bank (or any domestic government or business, either, for that matter) could possibly trump the First Amendment. It's a question that raises serious doubts about this judge's own judgment.

The judge also saw that his injunction, even if had stood, was essentially useless. Other Web sites -- some based outside this country -- quickly picked up Wikileaks' materials and reposted them, making the order moot almost as quickly as it came down.

"This was a home run for the First Amendment," said Matt Zimmerman, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group focusing on Internet liberty.

So a potentially disastrous curtailing of freedom of information has been turned into a triumph for openness and a valuable lesson for other judges who might share the warped sense of values that led to White's original injunction.

Thomas Elias is a political columnist whose commentary appears in newspapers throughout California. His e-mail address is tdelias@aol.com.