A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered the shutdown of a controversial web site dedicated to disclosing leaked confidential information.

Judge Jeffrey White’s ruling against Wikileaks.org is a major challenge to First Amendment rights in the online era. The site invited people to post information damaging to corporations and governments with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior,” according to a story posted Tuesday by The New York Times.

The response to the judge’s order, in some quarters, has been annoynance. “This is an outrageous move by a US court,” writes Richard Stiennon in his Threat Chaos blog for ZDNet.com.

“While First Amendment rights are not an absolute defense to reporting false information, it does appear here that Wikileaks.org is being censored without adequate opportunity to defend or explain its actions and postings,” Mark McCreary, an attorney with Fox Rothschild, told LinuxInsider as reported by ecommercetimes.com.

The Wikileaks ruling emerged from a case brought by a Cayman Islands bank. In court papers, the bank claimed a “disgruntled ex-employee” provided the site with stolen documents in violation of a confidentiality agreement. This is what caught the attention of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks attempts at government secrecy from time to time.

In its blog Secrecy News, the federation says, “The disclosure restrictions that wikileaks managed to defeat were not exactly those of a tyrannical government bent on censorship. They were banking secrecy laws that protect ordinary people as well as corporate malefactors. … Wikileaks has helped set an unfortunate precedent that may make the next court injunction against a public web site that much easier to obtain.

White’s order against Wikileaks.org amounts to shuttering a site while leaving the back door unlocked. The permanent injunction ordered the site’s domain registrar to disable the domain name, preventing people from accessing it. The site can be accessed through the Internet Protocol address, or IP, essentially the back door for people to view the information denied them through legal ruling.

“As NewsRadio’s Joe Rogan once said, ‘Dude, you can’t take something off the Internet,” John Paczkowski of All Things Digital writes. “That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.”