WikiLeaks, a wiki site that helps insid­ers release infor­ma­tion anony­mously, was in the news last month when its pri­mary domain name (wikileaks.org) was removed from the Domain Name System. A San Francisco judge ordered the move, which effec­tively made it impos­si­ble to reach any part of the wikileaks.org web­site directly. Fortunately for whistle­blow­ers world­wide, the site was still acces­si­ble via an alter­nate domain name -- wikileaks.be -- which was reg­is­tered in Belgium, and there­fore not sub­ject to injunc­tions from US judges. (Technically, it was also acces­si­ble by IP address for those moti­vated enough to bypass the DNS.)

Two weeks later, the judge reversed his own deci­sion, and wikileaks.org came back online. The case raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions, start­ing with, when you’re deal­ing with a wiki, who do you sue? The “owner” of the wikileaks.org domain is in Australia, the phys­i­cal servers are in Sweden and Belgium, and the con­trib­u­tors are anony­mous and unlogged. So, when the bank Julius Baer wanted to sue some­one for leak­ing inter­nal doc­u­ments, the only domes­ti­cally iden­ti­fi­able party was Dynadot, the San Mateo-based reg­is­trar of the wikileaks.org domain. (Of course, the bank’s approach back­fired, as it only drew more atten­tion to WikiLeaks -- and to Julius Baer’s alleged wrong­do­ings -- than ever before, which was exactly what they wanted to avoid. I, for one, had never heard of WikiLeaks before I heard about the case in the news.)

WikiLeaks is a case study in some­thing com­pletely new: a col­lec­tively authored pub­li­ca­tion where every con­trib­u­tor is fully anony­mous and untrace­able. At least one other site I’ve seen, Strictly No Photography, uses a sim­i­lar model to share pro­tected infor­ma­tion (pho­tos, in this case). It will be inter­est­ing to watch these mod­els evolve, pay­ing close atten­tion to how var­i­ous legal struc­tures react to them.