Fortunately, a number of privacy and civil rights advocates are calling on a federal court to reconsider its decision.
A motion was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and a Wikileaks user asked the court for permission to intervene in the case.
The groups asked the court to dissolve its permanent injunction disabling the Wikileaks.org Web site. They claimed that the court's action violated their First Amendment right to access the contents of the Wikileaks Web site.
Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is also sympathetic towards Wikileaks and the center filed a brief opposing the court's injunctions against Wikileaks and its domain registrar Dynadot LLC. The brief that they filed also cited First Amendment concerns.
The new found support for Wikileaks comes in the wake of two injunctions issued by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White on February 15. The injunctions were in response to a lawsuit filed by the Julius Baer Group, a Swiss bank that, according to documents on Wikileaks, was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the U.S.
The rulings elicited vociferous criticism from privacy and civil rights groups that saw it as an unprecedented violation of First Amendment rights.
An additional hearing takes place tomorrow.
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