So, I see an article at the BBC News website today (here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…250916.stm ) and it reports on how a California court has ordered the website Wikileaks.org to be taken offline. From the article: "A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers."

The catch is, that the above screencap was taken by me *after* I read the BBC News article. Seems like folks at the BBC, good as they are at reporting news with reasonable depth, still make mistakes. Of course, the real problem here isn't that the BBC makes the odd mistake. It's that a site like Wikileaks.org is being threatened in this way.

More from the article: "The case was brought by lawyers working for the Swiss banking group Julius Baer. It concerned several documents posted on the site which allegedly reveal that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

The documents were allegedly posted by Rudolf Elmer, former vice president of the bank's Cayman Island's operation.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer said he could not comment on the case because of "pending legal proceedings".

The BBC understands that Julius Baer asked for the documents to be removed because they could have an impact on a separate legal case ongoing in Switzerland."

This makes no sense to me. So, a legal case in another country is grounds for people in the US (and the rest of the world) to go without information that they need in order to know who to trust or who to work for or who to avoid? This decision by the California court removes ALL whistleblower information that Wikileaks.org was hosting from the public--not just the stuff pertaining to this Swiss case.

This kind of censorship harms us all and it allows crimes to be committed and it allows the criminals who commit them to get away with it.

So much for freedom of speech.