A U.S. Districts Judge went back on his decision to prohibit a website from posting bank records from various off-shore banks. The initial deceision was based on a lawsuit filed by a Swiss Bank, Julius Baer.
Here are some of the details from Reuters.com
By Philipp Gollner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday reversed his earlier ruling shutting down a Web site with private bank data from Switzerland's Julius Baer Holding AG.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White reversed his February 15 order after hearing arguments by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and other free-speech groups that his decision amounted to unconstitutional prior restraint.
"There are serious questions of prior restraint and possible violations of the First Amendment," White ruled from the bench in his San Francisco courtroom.
"The court has serious questions whether those concerns raised before the court make the granting of the relief requested by the plaintiffs constitutionally appropriate," he added.
White ruled that Baer, based in Zurich, could continue with its lawsuit against the Web site, Wikileaks.org, and Dynadot LLC, the Web site's domain-name registrar. White had issued a permanent injunction on February 15 ordering Dynadot, based in San Mateo, California, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain.
Baer had sued Wikileaks and Dynadot earlier this month after the site posted documents including bank records of about 1,600 clients with accounts in a Baer subsidiary in the Cayman Islands.
So the ACLU is defending the consitutional rights of someone who is posting other people's bank records on the internet. Maybe it's my immense lack of any sort of legal training or degree (remember, I am NOT a lawyer) but common sense would seem to agree with the original ruling, which I'll paraphrase below -
Don't publish bank records that aren't yours on the internet!
I was going to write more, but I'm quite frankly baffled. The article goes on to say explain how Swiss banks are used as a haven for the wealthy looking to hide their money from the IRS. It also mentions that the poster of the records is a self-proclaimed "whistle-blower." That's all well and good, and maybe the use of Swiss and other off-shore banks to facilitate illegal activities should be put into the spotlight. But placing private citizens' bank record on the web for quite literally the entire world to see is not the right way to do it.
Committing one crime to expose another just weakens your cause. It sucks, but you need to stay within the law in order to enforce it. Sure, the Batman lover in me says "The system doesn't always work. Get the crooks by any means.", but this isn't Gotham.
As much as I'd love to see the "bad guys" get taken down I don't want a precedent set where anyone who gets a hold of my bank records (and it wasn't mentioned how the records were obtained) can post them for all to see. Granted, it's because I have so little money that it would be painfully embarassing, but I think you all see my point.
If anyone wants to weigh in, please leave a comment.
I think your paraphrase of the ruling does not contain near enough nuance to accurately describe the situation. I'm not a lawyer either, but there is a vast difference between removing something that shouldn't be on a site, and going to the registrar and turning off the entire site.
The first amendment freedom v. people's privacy being violated is an issue that is still being litigated, from what you posted. It's the "internet death penalty" that got reversed, and well it should have. It's a pretty scary world if a DMCA complaint meant that I could take your site offline. I could think of a lot of things that I'd like to do with that kind of system, but it would get pretty out of hand rather quickly, no?
Good call, Todd. It is a bit of a tightrope, I'd think. Because what if you argued that the website was used to commit a crime and should be shut down.
Would that argument fly? I don't know.