Bank drops lawsuit against Wikileaks

The bank Julius Bear moved to withdraw its lawsuit against the whistle-blower Web site Wikileaks.

The bank said Wikileaks had displayed stolen, confidential bank documents on its site. A judge in California ordered the site taken off the Internet -- meaning, as I understand it, that its name was removed from DNS registrars.

The New York Times reported that the same judge withdrew his order, "saying that he was worried about its First Amendment implications and that he thought it might not be possible to prevent viewing of the documents once they had been posted on the web anyway."

Experts interviewed by the Times believe that this marks the end of the bank's legal actions against Wikileaks, at least in the United States.

Now, this is a good thing. I understand that the bank was eager to protect its documents, but they went about it in the wrong way, ensuring that more attention would be drawn to the documents.

Also, another random comment: It's pretty naive for a judge to think he can order a Web site removed from the Internet. Is such a thing even possible without physically deleting the files from the server where they are stored?

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