 |
 |
|
|
Home
| Friday 29th February
2008 | Issue 622
PLUMBING THE DEPTHSIn case you (like us, if truth be told) hadn’t heard the high-pitched tones of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks above the general din of the internet, allow us to blow their horn in your general direction... Set up with an interface very like Wikipedia (SchNEWS’ lazy journalists favourite source of approximate ‘facts’), the idea is give an untraceable, anonymous platform for the disillusioned or conscience-laden in high places to leak documents exposing the corrupt shenanigans of the rich and powerful, in the interests of transparency and the public good. The site has received over a million submissions in its time and has published some important exposés in the past, such as the Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures and evidence of major bank fraud in Kenya that apparently affected the Kenyan elections. Concentrating on exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, little has been done to stem the flow - but now leaks flagging up the dodgy dealings of the global elites have been ruffling a few feathers. There were stern legal threats after the recent publication of a confidential briefing memo relating to the dramatic collapse of the Northern Rock bank (suits you, Darling) and last week a somewhat more profitable Swiss Bank took action in the US and obtained a legal injunction which led to serious attempts to shut the site down. The ever neutral (read: we don’t care where your big pile of cash came from) Swiss were upset by the release of hundreds of documents which showed that Bank Julius Baer, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, had been involved in offshore tax evasion and money laundering – implicating extremely wealthy and, in some cases, politically sensitive clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru. Usually in such cases of disputed or unprovable documents appearing on the web, orders are made to merely take down those particular pages until they can be substantiated. However, in this case the bank got a judge in San Francisco to order that Wikileak’s DNS registrar, Dynadot, remove all DNS hosting records for the entire domain name, preventing it routing internet traffic to anything but a blank ‘park’ page. There have also been reports of attempts to lock down the site through Denial of Service attacks and threats to its DNS record. Heavy stuff for documents the bank claim are all just mere forgeries by a disgruntled ex-employee – one they have rushed to gag and press charges against in Switzerland. Something to hide fellas? Not so claims a bank spokesman, all praise for the concept of freedom of speech and transparency...except that, “Wikileaks should publish whatever it judges to be accurate, but not stolen or forged documents that concern us.” (our emphasis on what presumably are the three key words in his statement.) Luckily the site’s founders know know that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, so they’ve got an network of cover names from which to operate. So even while www.wikileaks.org is down, you can still see for yourself at mirror sites like www.wikileaks.be and www.wikileaks.cx There’s also a forum site with more info about the case, which now has mainstream journalist organisations lining up to support it – see www.wikileak.org
Subscribe to SchNEWS: Send 1st Class stamps (e.g. 10 for next 9 issues) or donations (payable to Justice?). Or £15 for a year's subscription, or the SchNEWS supporter's rate, £1 a week. Ask for "originals" if you plan to copy and distribute. SchNEWS is post-free to prisoners.
|
||
@nti copyright - information for action - copy and distribute! |
||
