Why are lawyers so greedy in their legal claims ? Words like "all" or "every" should not be allowed in legal language, without explicit caveats and qualifications, limiting their scope.
Judge Jeffery S.White's approval of the first Restraining Order against WikiLeakS and the Domain Name Registrar Dynadot LLC was bad enough.
His second one, a Proposed Amended Temporary Restraining Order, is even wider in scope and is remarkable for several features, which seem to betray an unfamiliarity and incompetence with the Internet, which is astonishing for someone who works in the internet savvy city of San Francisco.
Hat tip to the Law Librarian Blog Permanent Injunction issued against Wikileaks:
The Citizen Media Law Project has a 10 page .pdf copy of the Second Order made by the judge Hon. Jeffrey S. White against Wikileaks:
Proposed Amended Temporary Restraining Order and Order To Show Cause re. Preliminary Injunction 4405-2\PLE\PROP-ORD-TRO 021408 CV08-0824 JSW (.pdf 10 pages)
N.B. if you are within US Federal Court legal jurisdiction, and if you are actually hosting copies of the alleged documents, rather than simply publishing links to, or pointing sub-domains at, the home page of WikiLeakS.org servers in Sweden, then you may wish to remain legally ignorant and able to deny that you have actually read the text of this Court order. Try using Tor or other means of obscuring your computer's real IP address, before you open the .pdf file link above, or before you continue to read the rest of this blog article.
A minor point first: The Order was signed on Thursday 14th February has immediate effect, and it orders that a copy must be emailed to the Defendants by the following day Friday
However the previous Order forcing Dynadot to suspend the Domain Name Registration of WikilLeaks.org , also had immediate effect, thereby stopping all emails to legal@wikileaks.org.etc. - how do the lawyers expect an email to be delivered to a no longer active internet domain name ?
The number of innocent people, and the "collateral damage" implied by this list of people and organisations, many of whom are outside of the USA, is huge:
all of the Wikileaks Defendants’ DNS host service providers, ISP’s, domain registrars, website site developers, website operators, website host service providers, and administrative and technical domain contacts, and anyone else responsible or with access to modify the website
[...]
Defendants are to immediately provide Plaintiffs’ counsel with the name, address, telephone number, and facsimile transmission number for all of their DNS hosting services, ISP’s, domain registrars, website site developers, website operators and website host service providers,
Thirdly, and almost comically, the greedy lawyers, instead of being content with just the list of alleged documents relating to the tax evasion, money laundering and, perhaps, some perfectly legal financial activities in the Cayman Islands subsidiary of Bank Julius Baer, they had to, stupidly, include
"whether or not such documents and information are authentic, semi-altered, semi-fraudulent or forged,"
How can you possibly claim copyright infringement damage on forged documents ?
This looks like an unintended, but logical consequence:
"internal non-public company documents and/or which contains private client or customer bank records and/or identifies client or customer names, data, account records and/or bank account numbers,"
This could mean the crippling all of Bank Julius Baer's own use of the internet to provide private electronic banking and financial investment advice to their customers over the internet.
The Order does not just cover Wikileaks but also the insiders and whistleblowers inside Bank Julius Baer, who might be tempted to blow the whistle on their internet media inept employers.
Like any modern international financial institution, Bank Julius Baer promotes itself on the world wide web at
http://www.juliusbaer.com
Which at first glance should be exempt from the Order, as public internet web server pages, files and images are not usually
internal non-public company documents
However even the English language version of their home page contains this bit of HTML source code comments, probably related to the press release news items. However this contains some Javascript source code warnings:
var __wpmExportWarning='This Web Part Page has been personalized. As a result, one or more Web Part properties may contain confidential information. Make sure the properties contain information that is safe for others to read.
How is an Internet Service Provider meant to comply with the Order, except by blocking the Bank Julius Baer public website, which may contain confidential data
Even worse, like most large financial institutions, Bank Julius Baer operates services via the internet, through which their customers can access their bank accounts, investment portfolios, investment research advice etc. - all of which is not public, but private data or documents, and therefore covered by this Restraining Order.
-
http://www.gam.com Global Asset Management, based in London
- http://www.infidar.ch nfidar Investment Advisory Ltd in Zurich
- https://ebaer.juliusbaer.com eBaer ebanking in Switzerland
- https://e-jbs.juliusbaer.com.sg e-JBS ebanking in SIngapore
- https://e-JBN.juliusbaer.com/ e-JBN
- http://www.jbfundnet.com Fund offer
- http://research.juliusbaer.com JBresearch
This Order also seems to cover the use or abuse of any Bank Julius Baer internet systems e.g. Email or File Transfer or Virtual Private Networks etc. connecting to their Class B IP address allocation from the IP Plus, a subsidiary of Swisscom, the main telecomms company in Switzerland.
inetnum: 159.103.0.0 - 159.103.255.255
netname: BAERNET
descr: Bank Juliusbaer & Co Ltd
country: CH
Any prudent, law abiding Internet Service Provider, or any other Company or Financial Institution, especially those within the legal jurisdiction of the Federal Court in Northern California, i.e. in the entire United States of America, should also block access to and from the internet for these
Since Bank Julius Baer has offices in Los Angeles and New York, these offices at least, should have their internet access blocked, by virtue of this far too widely draughted Order.
The list of files in the Exhibit "A" appendix, which have been culled from the WikilLeakS pages, include the SHA 256 cryptographic secure hash algorithm checksums. These are not mentioned or explained by whoever wrote this Order. If any of the other copies of these alleged documents differ by so much as one single keystroke or space from these particular copies, they will provably have a different SHA 256 checksum, and will be provably not the actual documents specifically mentioned in the Exhibit "A" appendix.
Here is the text of the Permanent Restraining Order, for the benefit of search engine queries:
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