The dangers of computer-illiteracy in the justice system

[dsrtao]

Whether it was right or wrong to attempt it (WRONG! DEFINITELY WRONG!) a judge in California did it ineffectively:

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ordered the domain name of wikileaks.org to be shut down.

http://wikileaks.in, http://wikileaks.be, and a dozen or two other pointers to the same website are still up, of course. And thanks to the Streisand Effect, now you also know that wikileaks is a Wikipedia-derivative for preserving, publishing and commenting on information leaked by whistleblowers.

Did the plaintiff not know what to ask for? Did the judge know how (in)effective disabling a particular domain name would be? Is computer illiteracy rampant?

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Maybe his hands were tied and this was the best he could do. "Definitely DO NOT go to a site named wikileaks, which you can EASILY GOOGLE."

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think that the justice system is full of ignorants. The case a few months ago of a teacher who got porn spam via email (unsolicited) and was fired for it, when it wasn't under her control or volition, comes to mind. It doesn't surprise me at all about this wikileaks thing.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

Third possibility: Perhaps, much like a judgement for $1 for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit, this was a way for the judge to allow the information to remain while technically making a ruling for the plaintiff.

[robertdfeinman.livejournal.com]

There are legal and technical issues.
You have mentioned the technical ones. I don't think the judge was trying to be coy, he thought that this would prevent access.Who gave him this advice would be interesting to know, but just pushes the technical illiteracy back one step.

On the legal side, there is no legal basis for prior restraint, except in the "shouting fire" type of circumstance. If he wanted to make a ruling on the merits of the bank's case the most he should have done was to order the specific material in question to be removed.

This site has been a thorn in the side of the administration. I wouldn't put it past them to have found a front organization to file a case which would then allow the judge to shut down the whole site (unconstitutionally) while keep the fingerprints of the government agencies off the ruling.

I'm in the midst of a recent book "The Quest for Absolute Security" by Athan Theoharis where he details the history of the US secret police agencies overstepping their legal bounds starting before WWI and continuing to the present.

As anyone who watches what goes on knows most of these actions are motivated by ideological viewpoints of the agencies and not be actual threats to security. The bugging of the ACLU or Martin Luther King, or suffragettes, etc. has nothing to do with foreign threats and everything to do with maintaining the "American way of life". Up until recently that meant WASP's and Main Street Republicans.