In association with the International Commission of Jurists

December 2010

07 Dec

The Swiss domain name registrar Switch announced today that it will not shut down Wikileaks.ch as a result of Wikileaks' criminal activity. It does so at its peril. The pharmaceutical industry has long faced the question of registrar liability for hosting illegal pharmaceutical drug websites. Legitscript.com, a pharmaceutical watchdog, has summarized the obligations of domain name registrars...

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07 Dec

As numerous other websites happily conspire with the US government to shut down WikiLeaks, despite the fact that neither Assange nor anyone else associated with the website has ever been charged, much less convicted, of a disclosure-related crime, it is good to see that the world's foremost social networking site is willing to stick to its principles: Classified document publishing website...

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06 Dec

A couple of years ago, Josh Newcomer and I argued that political commitments have developed to a point where they should receive constitutional scrutiny.  In other words, we do not accept that because political commitments lack international legal force they should have absolute immunity from domestic legal processes.  Indeed, to the extent that political commitments may perform the same (or at least...

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06 Dec

According to Oxford University Press, my book checks in at a healthy 452 pages.  I still can't quite believe that I wrote something so long -- approximately 165,000 words, 130,000 more than anything else I've ever written.  Writing the book was extremely fun, but the hard work before the writing, the researching and the outlining, was often anything but.  It's...

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05 Dec

Needless to say, there’s a much warmer atmosphere at this year’s climate conference in Cancun than last year’s conference in Copenhagen.  By all accounts, the Mexicans have done a great job both in preparing the diplomatic groundwork for this year’s meeting and in running the conference during its first week.  They certainly have learned the lessons of the last war. ...

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05 Dec

It's easy to laugh at the USG for its directives to employees re the handling of Wikileaks cables (as the NYT put it this morning, a case of "shutting the barn door after the horse has left").  The idea that a State Department employee talking about the cables in a Starbucks, much less with her spouse at home, would constitute...

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04 Dec

Baruch Weiss, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Arnold & Porter who was involved in the AIPAC defense, explains why in an editorial today in The Washington Post.  I was particularly interested in his discussion of why he believes it would be difficult to prove that Assange knew the disclosures would harm national security: Here, Assange can make the...

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04 Dec

The following is a guest post by Anna Dolidze, a JSD candidate at Cornell Law School. In 2007-08, Dolidze was
 an Albert Podell Global Scholar at Risk at New York University Law
 School and a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute.  She has worked for a number of international organizations, including for Save the Children, Russian...

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03 Dec

The Library of Congress is preventing its employees or visitors using its wireless network from accessing WikiLeaks.  It released the following explanation: The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification...

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03 Dec

Well, not quite that broad, but almost.  This letter from career services at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (posted here) is a stunner: Hi students, We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department.  He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for...

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03 Dec

As one of WikiLeaks' defenders, I feel obligated to respond to Roger's post.  I have two major disagreements with it.  First, I think it significantly overstates the harm caused by WikiLeaks, although it would be equally erroneous to claim that WikiLeaks has caused no harm whatsoever.  Second -- and perhaps more important -- it completely ignores the the benefits of...

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