Wikileaks whistle blowing site pulled by court

By Dave Nixon

A US court has closed down a contentious website that permits whistle-blowers to publish corporate and government documents incognito.

The site, famous as Wikileaks.org, has been taken offline in the US due to a court order from the District Court in San Francisco. Nonetheless, the site continues online in other countries, including Belgium and Germany.

The order came following Swiss bank, Julius Baer, earlier this month filed a grievance in opposition to the site and San Mateo, California-based Dynadot, Wikileaks’ domain-name registry, for publishing several hundred of the bank’s documents.

A quantity of of those documents purportedly divulges that Julius Baer was mixed up in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the US.

The court ordered that “Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name,” according to court documents. Additionally It said that Dynadot should avert the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org site or any further website or server other than a blank park page until further notice.

A spokesman for Julius Baer could not be contacted for comment Monday.