1st Amendment v Individual rights

By Lou Grant | Feb 27, 6:38 PM

The Court injunction against the Wikileaks website is being appealed by a number of public interest groups. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White issued two orders last week. The first, a temporary restraining order, barred Wikileaks.org from posting bank documents on the Internet. The second permanent injunction ordered the domain registrar to disable the website's domain name.

The website posts internal documents, leaked by employees, onto the Internet. According to a story filed by Henry Weinstein of the Los Angeles Times, Wikileaks "urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage 'unethical behavior'…" White's orders came in a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer & Co., a Swiss bank.

Weinstein reports that attorneys for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told the court that the order amounted to prior restraint and violated the first amendment. "The first Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk," a group representing the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Times, Gannett and Hearst told the court.

"I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft," William Briggs, an attorney representing Julius Baer told Weinstein.

Although the site cannot be accessed by typing in the name, the injunction does not prevent accessing the account using the numeric address which is http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks.

More HERE.

Tagged: Los Angeles Times, William Briggs, ACLU