EFF, ACLU Back WikiLeaks

souls writes "Seems like the forces to protect freedom-of-speech in the groundsetting Wikileaks.org case have spoken: Henry Weinstein at LA Times reports that a coalition of media and public interest organizations today urged judge Jeffrey White to rescind the shutdown of Wikileaks.org, which presents 'restraint on free speech that violated the First Amendment,' and is generally considered to become a representative case for free online speech. The dirty dozen organizations fighting for your voice and mine include the EFF, the ACLU, The Times, AP, Gannett, Hearst, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Society of Professional Journalists. Lets hope that is enough muscle to stop a judge running wild in favor of a bunch of offshore bankers! Meanwhile wikileaks is still going strong via all available other domains, and is currently organizing support and donations."

Re:Prior Restraint

[Chrisq]

Is it possible for wikileaks to get wikileaks.org changed to another domain registrar or should they just jump ship from this spineless drone?

1 Dynadot shall immediately lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar, [hostingprod.com].

Part of the settlement with Dynadot is for them to lock the domain so it cannot be transferred. Of course should the ruling be overturned they can then change ISPs if they want.

Wikileaks is not shut down.

[mbone]

Still there at

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks [88.80.13.160]

Their DNS is, of course, another question.

Re:Let's hope not

[sm62704]

A little googling found this [newsmeat.com] and more reliably this [opensecrets.org]. The last link is from opensecrets.org, which reports that over half of all contributions to him came from businesses. I found this bit of ABC News mudslinging [go.com] by Clinton to be interesting:

"Sen. Obama has some questions to answer about his dealings with one of his largest contributors Exelon, a big nuclear power company; apparently he cut some deals behind closed doors to protect them from full disclosure of the nuclear industry," she said.
<snip>
Obama's spokesperson, Bill Burton, however did return fire.

"Leave it to Senator Clinton to attack Barack Obama for a bill that she actually co-sponsored and supported. Instead of playing the same Washington games that people are sick of, she should prove how fully vetted she is by finally releasing her tax returns so that voters can see where the millions of dollars she's dropped into her campaign are coming from," Burton said.

McCain, the Republican nominee, is a Republican. At least the Republican wing of the Corporate Republicrat Party is honest about who holds their leashes.

Re:Can't these places take more assertive action?

[Arancaytar]

1.) No site was shut down. The IP address that is quoted so often is the same server as the one wikileaks.org pointed to.

2.) If any DNS provider wanted to point wikileaks.org at its actual IP address rather than behaving like a good DNS and pointing it where its registrar says it should point, they could (I'm a bit shaky on the technical aspects, but this is after all how pharming works, so it's possible).

3.) I am principally opposed to hijacking domain names like this, and so should everyone who cares about a reliable internet. If we can't trust DNS servers to return the proper zone records, we are in very deep crap, technologically. This is just short of what Pakistan did with Youtube, and of cutting deep-sea cables - Don't Mess With The Internet. I know the centrally regulated names and numbers thing has its drawbacks at times, but it beats all-out anarchy.

Re:free speech can be overriden

[kelnos]

Actually, if you RTFA (I know, I know...), it references a landmark case during the Nixon administration that ruled that prior restraint cannot be applied in these matters, even in cases where so-called "national security" is at stake.