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Bank That Suppressed WikiLeaks Gives It Up
Is It Obvious writes "Bank Julius Baer has moved to withdraw suit against Wikileaks. We've discussed this story a few times, most recently when the judge lifted his injunction against WikiLeaks' registrar. The Baer story reflects an issue that will only grow worse over time: the gap between technology and the legal system's understanding of said technologies and their application to established legal principle. Given the rapid rate of technological change, is there a more practical way to interface emergent technology with our legal system while retaining civil rights over corporate rights?"
Can Wikileaks recover any legal expenses?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seriously, we can't even interface antiquated technology with our legal system and retain our civil rights over corporate rights.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The only problem with that is the impossibility of generalization over so many probably outcomes. The basic rights in the US are written in a general manner, which makes them subject to ever-changing interpretations, basically on the whims of the judge reading them at the time. Specificity is the attempt to cure that.
There is no good answer in any system designed to cover so many eventualities.
Define how you can tell the difference between a real expert and a snowjob artist.
This is the problem with the current Expert Witness system (which works vaguely like you suggest). You can get expert witnesses to say all sorts of stuff and people will believe them.
Gentoo Sucks
I don't mean to come off as a troll, but I think the answer is: "Stop fucking with us."
The things that we citizens of the Internet (if there is such a thing), nearly universally, seem to agree on is that we want to be left alone from the "powerful". Spammers? Leave us alone. Advertisers? By and large, leave us alone. Eavesdropping, corporate or governmental, leave us alone.
We reserve the right to poke, prod, and change the world around us by using the Internet, but we do not appreciate, nor do we seem to stand for, the reverse to hold true.
There are many technologists out there who have either found themselves displaced, replaced or burned out in their fields. Perhaps it would be a good time for some to change careers to law? The EFF might do well to offer scholarships to the best and brightest of those to become lawyers and then try to become judges.
Of course that may not work since very often the venue for many cases involving technology and patents are selected simply for its lack of expertise and knowledge perhaps to win through bullshit misconceptions. (Consider the pactice of jury selection where they always choose people who have the least understanding of law or legal procedure.)
.. everyone decides that something that shouold be private, isn't, and some poor individual, company, or country gets screwed by the same technologies that we have all grown to know and love.
It's not a lack of understanding on the part of these banks. They hire people like us all the time and are in many cases more versed with security and the realities of the Internet than 99% of us. It's a concern that, without adequate controls or cooperation from online presences and technologies, one day real damage will be done and there'll be nothing that can stop it.
They're not worried about injustices. Those are just their legal departments trying to build precedent for future legal actions. They're worried about real, actual damage when private, secret, or sensitive data is released through the same channels and nobody cooperates in removing it or halting its spread.
You idealistic types can gnash your teeth about the curtailing of your online freedoms, but what you're failing to grasp is the simple fact that Your Opinion Is Not Perfect. Your idea of what deserves to be free isn't the same as your neighbour's idea, and when pictures stolen from your webcam of you and your wife engaging in something that you think should be legal but isn't, are circulated to every major visitor-supported voyeur pornsite, you'll be sitting there thinking that maybe, just maybe, being forced to trust anonymous individuals on the Internet who are well beyond the reach of any punishment you can effect, isn't the utopia you thought it would be.
be more like medicine were only a specialist familiar with the problem can actually advise or operate. Can you imagine a plastic surgeon doing brain surgery, no and it would have massive legal consequences if it did happen. So why can Judges with no technical understanding in regards to the subject matter he is dealing with advise or take any action ?
What strikes me as amazing is the silence about this topic in Switzerland.
We are rather touchy about our banks and normally a leak of this magnitude would be considered top news. Yet, the topic was given no news coverage in Switzerland. After all, an internal document leaked which pointed towards illegal activities of the bank!
And before all the trolls have a party: no, this is not a normal business practice of a Swiss bank.
Disclaimer: Working for a Swiss bank, I am biased.
This case, and the one concerning the European travel agent I submitted earlier this week, both raise important questions about the policies for registering in the com/org/net TLDs. In both cases the offshore entities found their domains embargoed because their registrars were located in the United States even though the domains' owners and their operations were off-shore.
.com throughout the world makes that a non-starter for many businesses and leaves unresolved the question of what to do with all the existing registrations in the worldwide TLDs.)
This situation gives American courts jurisdiction over foreign entities who would otherwise be outside the American legal system. So, why hasn't someone in a place like Antigua set up a domain registration service for these TLDs? I realize that ultimately all roads lead back to Verisign (not a healthy thing either, in my opinion, but that's for another day). Still these cases have been directed against the registrars (eNom and Dynadot), not Verisign. I'm not up on all my ICANN politics and policies these days, so I'm asking for some help here. Is there some provision in how jurisdiction over com/net/org is set up so all the registrars must be in the US, or could there be off-shore registrars for these TLDs immune from American jurisprudence?
(Please don't reply just to say, "Let them register in their ISO domains." The visibility of