• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 19, 2008

In a case that has free speech advocates fuming, a federal district court judge in San Francisco issued an order directing the site Wikileaks, which hosts "secret" documents submitted by whistleblowers, to remove all information relating to the Swiss bank Julius Baer.

That injunction, signed Friday by Judge Jeffrey White, amends a far broader one he signed earlier that day, which would have shuttered the site in the United States. That earlier order directed domain registrar Dynadot to disable the Wikileaks domain, return blank pages to anyone who tried to access the site, and also turn over the IP addresses of any users "who accessed the account for the domain name."

Since its 2006 founding, Wikileaks has posted more than one million "secret" documents about matters like conditions at Guantanamo and money laundering by the former Kenyan president. The site says it's an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."

The dispute with Julius Baer came about after Wikileaks posted a host of documents, supposedly submitted by the bank's former vice president, Rudolf Elmer, allegedly showing it was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. Julius Baer asked the site to remove the documents and, when it got no satisfaction, went to court.

But despite Julius Baer's preliminary court victory, the bank may well have already lost the public relations war. As of Tuesday morning, Wikileaks is still accessible online here, while its description of the court case is available here. Even if Julius Baer should succeed in taking down those links, the documents are also available via BitTorrent.