A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer
by Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt - 23-01-2008
The largest Swiss bank specializing in hiding the assets of the ultra-rich, Bank Julius Baer, says it will file federal US proceedings against the transparency group Wikileaks by Friday.
Over
the last two weeks, Wikileaks has released several hundred documents
from a Swiss banking whistleblower purportedly showing offshore tax
evasion and money laundering by extremely wealthy and, in some cases,
politically sensitive clients from the US, Europe, China and Peru.
Part
of the data was leaked to US and German tax authorities in 2005 and the
Wall Street Journal ran an article on the act of leaking but not those
mentioned in the material. The detail and specific allegations have
previously been unavailable to the public.
"The judge’s action drew criticism — and court filings — from numerous organizations concerned that the order violated the First Amendment protection of free speech. Because Wikileaks operates sites, like Wikileaks.cx, in other countries, the documents were and are still widely available, both in the United States and elsewhere.
In reversing himself at a hearing here on Friday, Judge White acknowledged that the bank’s request posed serious First Amendment questions and might constitute unjustified prior restraint. He also appeared visibly frustrated that technology might have outrun the law and that, as a result, the court might not be able to rein in information once it had been disclosed online.
“We live in an age,” Judge White said, “when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law.”
Critics of Judge White’s previous order had said one problem was its breadth: It obstructed access to documents beyond those that the bank said contained confidential information. But he noted that as a practical matter, no ruling might achieve what the bank wanted."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/us/01wiki.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin