A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the shutdown of an anonymous whistleblower site, wikileaks.org. More precisely, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ordered a Bay Area Internet host to disable the main Wikileaks.org site and prevent the organization from transferring to any other server until further notice.

The website is still available here: 88.80.13.160 as the IP address is still running. San Mateo, California-based Dynadot, which hosts Wikileaks.org, was ordered to cease the resolving of DNS entries for the domain. Garret Murai, a lawyer for Dynadot, said to San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday that the shutdown was intended to be temporary.

You can also access the site through its mirrors in Belgium, Germany and the Christmas Islands. They have been registered through domain registrars other that Dynadot, thus were not affected by the injunction.

The order was triggered by a Swiss bank's lawsuit. The Julius Baer bank filed a complaint earlier this month against the site and Dynadot for posting several hundred of the bank’s documents. Some of those documents, posted by a former bank employee, allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the U.S.

The documents leaked on the embattled site contain numerous references to the bank's former vice president in the Caymans, Rudolf Elmer, but it's unknown whether he is the whistleblower.

Wikileaks has been under fire since its inception in December 2006, as confidential documents belonging to some institutions have been posted on the site. Critics also have questioned the motives of the site’s founders. However, many others have praised the site for supporting the free dissemination of information.

"The order was entirely written by Cayman Islands Bank Julius Baer lawyer and was accepted by Judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003," Wikileaks said in an e-mail statement quoted by Agence France-Presse.

In addition, in a press statement on its site, Wikileaks called the U.S. order "clearly unconstitutional" and said it "exceeds its jurisdiction."

Despite Court’s order, Wikileaks states that it will "keep on publishing, in fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."

"There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site," said to the New York Times David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School, who called the order "not constitutional."