government censorship in the news

Over the past week there has been a lot of news of wikileaks.org, a website which anonymously collected released documents from 'whistleblowers' on governments and companies. After one bank sued the website, a judge ordered that the site be taken off the internet! This restriction of freedom of speech is interesting for many reasons:

Firstly, this sort of behavior is "unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the most repressive regimes" (globalintegrity.org). This disregard for freedom of speech is surprising to see in the United States.

However, regardless of the fact that such behavior shouldn't occur in the United States, such restrictions are useless because they are completely ineffective! The judge ordered that the domain name wikileaks.org be taken down by the internet service provider which hosted it, but because there are a number of servers throughout the world where wikileaks is actually hosted, the site itself is still alive (and probably thriving due to all the media attention.) The domain name simply is a easily memorable address that you can type into your browser, but you can still access the site through other addresses and even a number of IP addresses. If you'd like to see the site, check out this list of mirrors at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#External_links

How does this relate to protocol and control? Due to the structure of the internet, the governmental policies which our government would like to enforce on the internet is impossible. Real control is in the protocol and the protocols being used (simply by convention) are not aligned with the governmental policy.

Ironically, such policy has the opposite effect. People only want to view restricted content more. I disagree with one of the below posts which argues that the annoyance of restrictions let the oppressors win. I think that people are more likely to want to see what they're not supposed to. I was a lot more likely to view and read wikileaks after I found out that our government tried to shut it down.