The case of whistle-blowing site Wikileaks being taken down by court order raises not only important issues of censorship, but questions about whether technology is making many existing laws outdated.

As with contempt of court (see Ed’s Blog “UK judge wants online reports restricted”), laws that effectively gag a media outlet are now easily circumvented by the Internet, as material that is censored in one country can be published on a site outside that country’s jurisdiction and accessed by anyone (the possible exception being China, which has the immense human resources necessary to monitor individual Web usage).

Wikileaks ran foul of Swiss bank Julius Baer & Co., and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, which claimed that Wikileaks had posted confidential, personally identifiable information about some of the bank’s customers. Wikileaks, which describes itself as an organisation “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists”, has a mission to publicise malfeasance by both businesses and governments.

Julius Baer, however, managed to persuade a federal judge in San Francisco that documents published by Wikileaks had been stolen by a disgruntled former employee and that account holders identified in them had been unfairly identified and their privacy therefore breached.

The judge issued an order requiring the registrar of Wikileaks’ domain name to turn off the address. The ruling was largely symbolic, because it did not affect Wikileaks sites hosted outside the USA. But in a country where freedom of speech is embodied in the Constitution, Wikileaks became a cause celebre for advocates of free speech, who filed numerous suits on its behalf demanding that the ruling be revisited.

They won their case. Last weekend, NZ time, District Judge Jeffrey S. White withdrew his takedown order, while expressing frustration that technology had outrun the law.

“There are serious concerns that the court has, and serious questions raised, about the effectiveness of any order that this court might issue given the current state of affairs,” Judge White said.

So while Wikileaks is back in business, some customers of the bank may feel with some justification that they have suffered unduly and have no form of legal redress. Julius Baer may exercise the option of appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, but that court’s task is to determine whether a case is covered by the US Constitution, so the First Amendment (covering free speech) might prevail.

Customers named in the Baer documents may, of course, choose to take their business elsewhere. This could expose Wikileaks to civil action from the bank on the grounds that its business and reputation were damaged. Whatever the outcome, lawyers will be the winners on the day.