The judge's actions roused media and cyber-liberties groups to defend WikiLeaks' rights under the First Amendment and brought renewed scrutiny to the documents the bank hoped to shield.

[2] In 2002, the bank learned that records pertaining to the arrangement of anonymizing trusts in the Cayman Islands for clients from 1997 to 2002 had been leaked.

[3] According to Daniel Schmitt's analysis for WikiLeaks, leaked account data exists from after the date that Elmer left the Caymans.

[4][better source needed] On 16 January 2011, Elmer announced he would hand over offshore account details of 2,000 "high-net-worth individuals" to WikiLeaks.

[7][8] A coincidental fire at the hosting company used by WikiLeaks, PRQ, centered in a high power supply regulator serving the majority of the data center, shut down and destroyed some sections of the specific DNS and dedicated hosting server racks used by WikiLeaks the same week.

To shut down these access methods, it would be necessary to pursue injunctions in the jurisdictions where they are registered, or where the servers reside, which are deliberately scattered to make this difficult.

[13][14] After the injunction was initially granted, it was successfully challenged in a joint action by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and Jordan McCorkle.