'Whistleblower' website shut by US court over bank documents

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A website designed to let whistleblowers publish sensitive documents has been ordered shut down by a US federal judge at the request of a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, court documents showed Monday.
US District Judge Jeffrey White in California, in an injunction order dated Friday, ordered the shutdown of the website known as Wikileaks.org
The judge ruled in favor of Swiss-based Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. and its Cayman Islands subsidiary Julius Baer Bank & Trust, saying that "immediate harm will result to (the bank) in the absence of injunctive relief."
White ordered the California web hosting company Dynadot to "immediately clear and remove" records from Wikileaks and "prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank page," until the court can review the case further.
Wikileaks was launched in early 2007 with the help of Chinese dissidents to help whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive documents on the Internet without being traced.
It was aimed at "oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East," but also was being used to post "unethical" behavior in Western countries.
The shutdown came after the website posted documents relating to offshore activities of Julius Baer. A series of documents cited in the court order have titles that include "tax avoidance," "tax evasion," and "offshore tax scheme."
Wikileaks said in an e-mail statment: "The order was entirely written by Cayman Islands Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by Judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003."
Despite the injunction, Wikileaks states that it will "keep on publishing, in fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."
WikiLeaks' website says the organization was founded by "Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa."
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Whistleblowing website vows to defy court gag

This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 19 2008 on p8 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 00:29 on February 19 2008.

An international website that claims to blow the whistle on corporate and governmental fraud vowed yesterday to defy attempts by a US court to close it down. Wikileaks allows whistleblowers to anonymously post documents in an attempt to expose corruption and wrongdoing. Its owners said yesterday that a Californian judge had ordered that the site be taken offline last week, after an injunction from a Swiss bank.

The bank, Julius Baer, sought the injunction to prevent claims being posted online that it was involved in money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. It has indicated that the information was prejudicial to an ongoing court case.
Last night, the version of the site hosted in the US remained unavailable, but duplicate sites hosted in India and Belgium were still accessible.

Information on the Wikileaks site led to a front-page Guardian story in August 2007, exposing money laundering in Kenya by former president Daniel Arap Moi, and in November the site published a confidential briefing memo from Northern Rock that was picked up by the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC.

The site published hundreds of pages of information from a former bank employee about the offshore activity of Julius Baer. Several documents allegedly relate to money laundering claims. The bank could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Last week a Californian district court judge, Jeffrey White, accepted the bank's injunction without amendment and also ordered Dynadot, the site's domain registry, to delete all record of the address from the central internet domain registry. Wikileaks' founders said the US court's move breached the first amendment.
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Court puts kybosh on telltale site
Asher Moses
February 19, 2008 - 11:50AM

A controversial website providing a safe haven for whistleblowers seeking to upload confidential documents has been forced offline by a US court.
The Swiss bank Julius Baer sought an injunction against the Wikileaks site after it published documents purportedly showing shady offshore activities - including money laundering and tax evasion - allegedly supported by the bank in the Cayman Islands.
The site has also published millions of sensitive documents, including the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, the primary operations manual for the running of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and evidence of involvement by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi, in a $US4.5 billion money laundering scheme.
But in a bizarre development that Wikileaks claims is unconstitutional, a court in California ordered the domain name registrar Dynadot to remove wikileaks.org from the internet completely.
And in a seemingly unrelated stroke of bad luck, the site's main servers in Sweden were hit by a fire and mass attacks over the internet, which sought to overload the site and take it offline.
The site, which counts Australians among its volunteers, remains offline but mirrored versions under different names such as wikileaks.be and wikileaks.de are still accessible. Ironically, the court order and subsequent media coverage have served only to increase interest in the documents, which can still be viewed online.
"Wikileaks will keep on publishing, in fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices," the site said on a mirrored version.
Julius Baer had argued that the documents should be removed because they could impact a separate legal case in Switzerland. The claims that the bank supported tax evasion and money laundering were allegedly made by its former chief operating officer of the Cayman Islands branch.
US District Judge Jeffrey White, however, ordered the entire site be taken down as the bank would face "immediate harm" if it did not get "injunctive relief".
Wikileaks launched in 2006 and aims to uncover unethical behaviour by developing "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis". The site compares itself with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers that damaged the Nixon administration and eroded US public confidence in the Vietnam War.
A statement released by the site said that previous attempts by the Chinese Government and Thailand's military junta to censor Wikileaks were unsurprising, but the US injunction was "clearly unconstitutional".
The US constitution states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".
Censorship of this kind in the US is unprecedented and Wikileaks said it intended to fight the court order with its six San Francisco-based pro-bono lawyers.
"To find an injunction similar to the Cayman's case, we need to go back to Monday, June 15, 1971, when The New York Times published excerpts of Daniel Ellsberg's leaked 'Pentagon Papers' and found itself enjoined the following day," Wikileaks said in its statement.
"The Wikileaks injunction is the equivalent of forcing the Times' printers to print blank pages and its power company to turn off press power.
"The Supreme Court found the Times censorship injunction unconstitutional in a 6-3 decision."

Bloch's Double Standard

By Beth Daley
Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
February 15, 2008

Two weeks ago, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch accused the Department of Justice (DOJ) of blocking his supposed investigations into the U.S. attorney firings when DOJ's Inspector General asked Bloch to defer his review until they had completed their own investigation. At the time, the dueling investigations argument didn't pass muster with Bloch's office. But that same defense was good enough for Bloch to use in his own defense last week in a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Ranking Member Tom Davis.

The Committee wants to question Bloch about his seven-level wipe of computers at his office. That may have been an effort to cover up wrongdoing or obstruct an investigation into Bloch himself, according to the Wall Street Journal.


Bloch has canceled scheduled interviews with the Committee twice.
According to Bloch's letter last week:
This letter is in response to your letter of January 16, 2008 regarding the Committee's request for a transcribed interview of me. I continue to have substantial concerns about the Committee's request because any such interview may touch on a matter that remains under investigation by the Office of Personnel Management ("OPM").
That sounds familiar. According to the Washington Post a few weeks back: [DOJ Inspector General Glenn] Fine's office generally does not comment on investigations, but Cynthia Schnedar, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, rejected Bloch's letter as "both factually inaccurate and misleading."

She added: "We agree with the Department of Justice that the more responsible course would be for Mr. Bloch to postpone his limited review--as OSC has stated that it has done in other instances--so that it does not interfere with the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility's comprehensive joint investigation into the U.S. Attorney firings."

James P. Mitchell, a spokesman for Bloch, challenged Fine's office to explain the alleged inaccuracies in detail. "We have our jurisdiction," he said. "We have always said we will not be interfering with this investigation."

Looming in the background are questions as well about whether Bloch perjured himself when he testified before the Committee's Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia. Members of Congress questioned Mr. Bloch at the hearing about the circumstances surrounding the leak of an Office of Special Counsel report chastising GSA Administrator Lurita Doan. Sources say Bloch lied when he claimed he knew nothing about the leak of the report, and that he, in fact, may have directed that it be leaked in order to bask in the media spotlight.

Sources also raise questions about whether Bloch's supposed investigation of the U.S. attorney firings at DOJ is even within OSC's jurisdiction, whether he is being disingenuous in claiming to be actively investigating Karl Rove, or whether Bloch is simply using every last trick in the book, from seven level security wipes to phony high profile investigations, to save his own hide.

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2008/02/blochs-double-s.html

Hi Everyone,

I hope this blog is helpful to you. There is a dramatic increase in published articles regarding Whistleblowers and their situations. I am researching, posting and doing a bit of writing myself, but primarily my goal on this blog is to facilitate others, (whistleblowers and others who have interest in their situations), being able to read and update more quickly and easily, the increasing reporting being done on this topic by other sources. (I understand that many people involved in Whistleblower situations have even less time and energy than I do to research and read and it is important that they continue to do so.)

There are a growing number of sincere and persistent federal and industry employees out there who are totally fed up with the corruption in their workplaces which makes is very difficult for them to ethically do the jobs they were trained and hired to do. The Whistleblower Protection Act passed by the Senate and House recently that still awaits the promised Presidential Veto, President Bush threatened he would render should Congress pass this legislation which would offer further protection of Federal and Defense Whistleblowers. The protection we're talking about is protection from Prohibited Personnel Practices (PPP's, harassment, discrimination, persecution, and a host of other despicable activities undertaken by wrongdoers who may be outed by honest employees doing their oversight jobs and pointing out the problems.

I pass along a site that is keeping track of the Office of Special Counsel, the government office which is supposed to be watch-dogging and protecting federal employees who may be making complaints or noting corruption within our government. These observations and disclosures are usually a result of the employee becoming clearly aware of a problem in the course of doing their job as assigned. Unfortunately, particularly in the atmosphere we have at this time in government work, many of these employees are treated very badly and in punitive fashion. Many are afraid to complain. Those that do, typically go to the Office of Special Counsel, who is supposed to uphold prohibitions of PPP's and of the illegal actions of the whistleblower's coworkers and supervisors who are committing violations of Prohibited Personnel Practices policies/laws. Tragically, this office has notably not done its job and in fact has a track record under the current Chief of committing violations itself against its own employees.

To read more about this, please visit: http://whsknox.blogs.com/osc_watch/


I will check in from time to time. I have a lot more I want to talk about regarding education and other issues, but they will be coming in the future.

For those of you who write or would like to write, I recommend: www.Writing.Com and www.helium.com. You may post your own original writings, enter contests and much more at both of these sites.

Take care of yourselves! (It appears we cannot count on the government doing so lately!)

-VM

Time to Vote Contempt
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 14 February 2008

Alberto Gonzales may be out, but the country is still waiting for a full accounting of how he and his White House patrons cynically politicized the Justice Department. Congress is rightly asking questions about the actions of yet another United States attorney: New Jersey's Christopher J. Christie. The House also needs to stop procrastinating and vote to hold witnesses in contempt for refusing to testify in the wider scandal.
Federal prosecutors must be scrupulously nonpartisan. Mr. Christie, a Republican activist who got his job despite a lack of trial and criminal-law experience, has gone up to the line of acceptable behavior - and possibly crossed it.
He began an investigation of Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, late in a hard-fought election campaign. The charges now appear baseless, but at the time the news provided a big boost to Mr. Menendez's Republican opponent. Mr. Christie went against a long Justice Department presumption against opening investigations or bringing indictments right before an election, to avoid affecting the outcome.
There are also questions about Mr. Christie's decision to award, without competitive bidding, a lucrative contract to monitor a company accused of consumer fraud. The winner? Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, an influential Republican who was once Mr. Christie's boss. Senate and House leaders have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate.
Some of the people who likely know the most about the role politics has played in the Bush Justice Department have defied Congressional subpoenas to testify. Joshua Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, contend that they are protected from testifying by executive privilege. That is not enough. They have a legal obligation to appear before Congress and plead that privilege to specific questions.
The House Judiciary Committee voted in July to hold Mr. Bolten and Ms. Miers in contempt. The House's Democratic leadership has been trying to figure out the pros and cons ever since. The public needs to hear the testimony of these officials (along with Karl Rove, who is also refusing to appear), and the full House should vote as quickly as possible to hold them in contempt.
The House should also approve a resolution authorizing the Judiciary Committee to go to court to enforce the contempt citations if the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, as expected, refuses to do so.
The stakes are high. There are people in jail today, including a former governor of Alabama, who have raised credible charges that they were put there for political reasons. Congress's constitutionally guaranteed powers are also at risk. If Congress fails to enforce its own subpoenas, it would effectively be ceding its subpoena power. It would also be giving its tacit consent to the dangerous idea of an imperial president - above the law and beyond the reach of checks and balances.
The founders did not want that when they wrote the Constitution, and the voters who elected this Congress do not want it today.

The U.S. does not hold a monopoly on corruption and coverups. Read about Great Britain’s struggles and Tony Blairs blocking of bribes inquiery involving Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and his family. -VM

BAE: Secret Papers Reveal Threats from Saudi Prince
By David Leigh and Rob Evans
The Guardian UK
Friday 15 February 2008

Spectre of 'another 7/7' led Tony Blair to block bribes inquiry, high court told.
Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.
Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.
Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.
He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.
Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government.
The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals.
Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.
The judge said he was surprised the government had not tried to persuade the Saudis to withdraw their threats. He said: "If that happened in our jurisdiction [the UK], they would have been guilty of a criminal offence". Counsel for the claimants said it would amount to perverting the course of justice.
Wardle told the court in a witness statement: "The idea of discontinuing the investigation went against my every instinct as a prosecutor. I wanted to see where the evidence led."
But a paper trail set out in court showed that days after Bandar flew to London to lobby the government, Blair had written to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and the SFO was pressed to halt its investigation.
The case officer on the inquiry, Matthew Cowie, was described by the judge as "a complete hero" for standing up to pressure from BAE's lawyers, who went behind his back and tried to secretly lobby the attorney general to step in at an early stage and halt the investigations.
The campaigners argued yesterday that when BAE failed at its first attempt to stop the case, it changed tactics. Having argued it should not be investigated in order to promote arms sales, it then recruited ministers and their Saudi associates to make the case that "national security" demanded the case be covered up.
Moses said that after BAE's commercial arguments failed, "Lo and behold, the next thing there is a threat to national security!" Dinah Rose, counsel for the Corner House and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, said: "Yes, they start to think of a different way of putting it." Moses responded: "That's very unkind!"
Documents seen yesterday also show the SFO warned the attorney general that if he dropped the case, it was likely it would be taken up by the Swiss and the US. These predictions proved accurate.
Bandar's payments were published in the Guardian and Switzerland subsequently launched a money-laundering inquiry into the Saudi arms deal. The US department of justice has launched its own investigation under the foreign corrupt practices act into the British money received in the US by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington.
Prince Bandar yesterday did not contest a US court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country. The order will stay in place until a lawsuit brought by a group of BAE shareholders is decided. The group alleges that BAE made £1bn of "illegal bribe payments" to Bandar while claiming to be a "highly ethical, law-abiding corporation".