Bank Julius Baer sued WikiLeaks in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after records concerning anonymizing trusts and Cayman Islands clients from 1997 to 2002 appeared on the site. The bank said the documents should be removed and argued they could interfere with related Swiss litigation. Julius Baer also sent cease-and-desist notices to WikiLeaks and its registrar, Dynadot. The underlying records were contested: the bank said former Cayman unit COO Rudolf Elmer had falsified documents, while WikiLeaks alleged that leaked data existed from after his departure. Only 14 documents were directly pertinent to the U.S. case, according to the source.
On February 18, 2008, Judge Jeffrey White issued an injunction requiring Dynadot to lock the wikileaks.org domain and disassociate its DNS records from WikiLeaks’ servers. The order did not eliminate access through mirror sites or the site’s IP address, and civil-liberties and press organizations—including the EFF, ACLU, Public Citizen, AP, and major newspaper groups—challenged the measure on First Amendment grounds. White dissolved the injunction on February 29, 2008, after which WikiLeaks restored the domain; Julius Baer dropped the case on March 5. The episode became an early example of the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to suppress online material generated substantially greater public attention.
