Judge lifts ban on Wikileaks website

A federal judge in San Francisco today lifted an injunction he issued two weeks ago that had shut down a whistle-blowing website specializing in posting leaked documents about corporate and government misdeeds.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White also advised the Swiss bank that had sued wikileaks.org that it might want to reconsider pursuing the case. The decision was heralded by 1st Amendment advocates as a “home run” for free speech on the Internet.

White acknowledged in court this afternoon that there were serious questions about whether his original order represented a “possible violation of the 1st Amendment.” The judge said he was making no definitive finding on that issue now.

At the same time, he said he “has questions about whether granting the relief sought” by the bank would be constitutionally appropriate.

An attorney for Dynadot of San Mateo said that once the judge issued a formal written order, which is expected to happen as early as this afternoon, the site could be reinstated within 30 minutes to an hour.

“This was a home run for the 1st Amendment,” said Matt Zimmerman, an attorney with Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We got exactly what we wanted. The judge understood the serious 1st Amendment concerns and recognized the reality that in dealing with the Internet it’s difficult for him to do anything of consequence.”

White’s original order had drawn fire from a coalition of media and public interest organizations, which said it violated a bedrock U.S. legal doctrine known as prior restraint, which prohibits the government from barring publication of stories or material before they go to print, or in the case of the Internet, before they are posted.

The groups cited the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers dispute. In that case, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s bid to bar publication of a secret government history of the Vietnam War.

“The 1st Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and even when the source unlawfully obtained the documents,” said the media attorneys, whose clients include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, The Times, Gannett Co. and Hearst.

Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage “unethical behavior” by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The bank, Zurich-based Julius Baer & Co., had sought the site’s closure because of leaked documents suggesting corruption at its Cayman Islands branch. The advocates argued White’s original order was the equivalent of shutting down an entire newspaper over one allegedly libelous article.

Although Wikileaks’ domain name, under White’s original order, was disabled, the content remained available on mirror sites and through the group’s numerical address.

henry.weinstein@latimes.com