• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 27, 2008

A federal district court's broad order shutting down Wikileaks.org has been widely -- and justifiably -- criticized for violating the First Amendment. Now, a host of civil rights groups and news organizations are getting involved in the case, arguing that the order violates the free speech rights of people who post to the site as well as people who read it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Citizen Media Law Project and the Newspaper Association of America are among the groups who are weighing in on the case, which will be in court again on Friday.

A brief filed by the EFF and ACLU argues that the court's order here to restrain speech clearly infringes on the First Amendment and shouldn't have been entered as casually as it was. "In addition to protecting the rights of those who engage in expression themselves, the First Amendment protects the public's interest in receiving information," the groups wrote, adding that the U.S. Supreme Court has called prior restraints on speech "the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights."

In the year since Wikileaks went live, it's posted more than 1 million documents exposing matters like treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and corruption in Kenya.

But the shutdown order didn't stem from any military matter or question of public security, but a lawsuit by Swiss bank Julius Baer, which claimed that a disgruntled employee leaked false information to Wikileaks. The material allegedly implicates the bank's Cayman Islands branch in fraud and money laundering.

On Feb. 15, the court signed an injunction, described as "permanent," ordering domain registry Dynadot to stop hosting the site at Wikileaks.org and to return blank pages when people try to access the site at that url. Dynadot agreed to the terms so the case against it would be dropped -- even though the company had a near-foolproof argument that the case against it should have been dismissed because it's immune from suit under the Communications Decency Act.

While Dynadot clearly had a motive to resolve the case as soon as possible, the judge who signed the injunction should have known better than to issue an order that implicates the First Amendment without more analysis.

Despite the order, the site is widely available online at its IP address and mirror sites like Wikileaks.be.

But regardless of whether Wikileaks is still available online, the order enjoining Dynadot clearly violates the First Amendment and should still be dissolved.