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Oakland Internet activists last week gave a Swiss bank and a San Francisco judge a powerful demonstration of the "Streisand Effect". That's internet jargon for any effort to suppress online information that backfires by drawing much wider publicity.
In this case, the Julius Baer Bank sought an injunction against Wikileaks, a website that anonymously publishes whistleblower documents, for posting papers purporting to show money laundering and tax evasion schemes at the bank's Cayman Islands branch. A federal district judge late last week took the unusual step of shutting down the entire site instead of removing just the bank's documents.
Explosion of interest
What followed was an explosion of interest in the relatively obscure website, with many online activists helping to redirect curious eyes to alternative sites where the content had been reinstated.
The Wikileaks case points to the difficulty of enforcing national norms on a global, decentralised internet. Having weathered the first ruling, it's now unclear if Wikileaks's elusive representatives will even bother to mount a defence at the next court hearing.
"I think we are seeing the limits of a jurisdiction-based judicial system as it faces a relatively borderless Internet," says David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project, a Harvard-linked group advocating free speech.
The court orders are stunningly broad, he says, and suggest a lack of seriousness about the First Amendment. Rather than addressing just the handful of bank documents brought up by the case, Judge Jeffrey White tried to shut down the entire Wikileaks site, which claims to have received over 1.2 million documents "from dissident communities and anonymous sources".
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