A website designed to let whistleblowers publish sensitive documents has been ordered shut down by a US federal judge at the request of a Swiss bank and its Cayman Islands subsidiary, court documents showed Monday.

US District Judge Jeffrey White in California, in an injunction order dated Friday, ordered the shutdown of the website known as Wikileaks.org

The judge ruled in favor of Swiss-based Julius Baer & Co. Ltd. and its Cayman Islands subsidiary Julius Baer Bank & Trust, saying that “immediate harm will result to (the bank) in the absence of injunctive relief.”

The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

But it’s an issue that raises major privacy concerns – what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.

The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information – from palm prints to eye scans.

A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a “secret room” to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell’s 1984.

Powerful supercomputers are vacuuming up so much information that logs of calls to or from innocent Americans could exist in government databases indefinitely, the nation’s top intelligence official said Tuesday.

An untold number of communication logs on US citizens could exist within a NSA database of information gained through warrantless wiretaps of foreigners abroad, McConnell said, because NSA spies do not examine the full contents on all the information it collects until it has a reason to do so.

The Bush administration opposed in U.S. court on Friday an effort to peel back a secrecy lid over its domestic counterterrorism wiretapping program, which critics say infringes on privacy and rights.

“The public disclosure of the documents the ACLU requests would seriously compromise sensitive sources and methods relating to the collection of intelligence necessary for the Government to conduct counterterrorism activities.”