By Kristin Billera

The website, Wikileaks, could lead to even more serious legal dilemmas concerning anonymity on the Internet than reviews of wikileaksbusinesses or doctors.

The site is still under development, but Wikileaks is a Wikipedia-style database of leaked documents and analysis of these documents. The site was founded by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.”  The site also maintains a public Advisory Board comprised of people from various walks of life including human rights activists, investigative journalists, and the founder of the Chinese Democracy Party. When whistleblowers submit documents, they are encrypted so that it’s impossible to trace the documents back to the source. Furthermore, their servers are spread throughout multiple countries and no logs are kept of those who submit documents. After they are posted, the documents are opened up to the Wikileaks community so users can analyze their veracity and credibility and documents proven to be fabricated can be removed by the community.

The site has already run into legal trouble overseas when Theodore Reppe, who owns the Wikileaks.de domain name, was raided by German police last week after the site published a list of websites that the Australian government had banned. Both the Germans and Australians want the list removed from the site. According to Wired, Reppe said that “the police asked [him] for passwords to both wikileaks.org and wikileaks.de but did not understand his explanation of how domain names worked.”

In the US, someone published information from an unsecured campaign donor database for the U.S. Senate candidate from Minnesota, Norm Coleman. The database contained names, partial credit card numbers and contact information of over 4700 donors. IT consultant Adria Richards had discovered the database and posted a screenshot of it on her Flickr site and blog, however, no one has taken credit for the actual publication of the information on Wikileaks.  Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Minnesota Independent that the actions of Richards and Wikileaks were  not illegal because the information was in an unsecured database  in an open directory that was not password protected. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act only applies “protected computers.”

Unlike the recently decided Maryland Court of Appeals case in which the court ruled that websites do not need to disclose anonymous reviewers, in a case brought against Wikileaks, this would perhaps not even be an issue since the site goes so far to erase any trace of the identity of informants. That being said, the only remedy left for those harmed (e.g. libel, private facts, publication of trade secrets) if the site was misused would be a court order to remove the information, however, it’s not clear if Wikileaks would receive First Amendment protection akin to those of newspapers and other media because the totally anonymous leaking of documents is such a novel problem. It is possible that a site such as Wikileaks would be protected under New York Times v. U.S., which allowed the Pentagon Papers to be published, as well as the fact that the Internet remains largely unregulated in the United States.

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