Source.

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week.

Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents,

found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

The Julius Baer bank in Zurich succeeded in hamstringing

the shadowy individuals behind the website by the simple trick of moving not against them,

but against a US company that hosted their domain name.

Dynadot, the California resellers who collect a few dollars by this internet trade,

submitted to a legal injunction ordering the name to be deleted.

Yet however wise this scheme may have appeared at the time

to the Swiss bank's Los Angeles lawyers, Lavely & Singer,

it has now backfired in a big way.

The injunction blew up a gale of debate about internet freedom,

and sprayed the bank's secret documents all over the net.

It has also thrust into prominence an obscure group of dreamers and programmers

who want to provide what they call an "untraceable and uncensorable" leaking machine,

to be used by dissidents worldwide.

Those behind Wikileaks include Tibetan, Chinese and Thai political campaigners,

an Australian hacking author, and Ben Laurie,

a mathematician living in west London who is on the advisory board.

Wikileaks is not the first site of its kind. John Young, a New York architect,

has been posting leaked intelligence documents on his Cryptome site for some years.

But since its launch in late 2006, Wikileaks has had an impressive record.

When Northern Rock collapsed last autumn,

print media in London were gagged by a judge's order from re-publishing its leaked sales prospectus.

It was Wikileaks that kept the prospectus before the public,

along with the text of some threatening "not for publication" letters from the British lawyers, Schillings.

In the US, Wikileaks also made headlines last November with the publication of secret documents,

including the 238-page manual Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta,

a document that even the US military grudgingly admitted was genuine.

The Guantánamo document, including descriptions of everything

from transferring prisoners to evading protocols of the Geneva convention,

was a comprehensive guide to day-to-day operations at the controversial prison.

Wikileaks landed an even bigger coup last August

with a previously secret 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll,

which revealed allegations of massive corruption in Kenya.

The family of former Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi were reported to have siphoned off more than £1bn.