Hundreds of mirror sites circumvent attempts at internet censorship of the Cablegate documents of Wikileaks. However, if following the disgusting paradigm of infamous Graecokleptocrats, who persecute and jail dissident bloggers, Wikileaks were to disappear permanently from the internet today, tomorrow's embassy cables stories would still appear.
Not that removing Wikileaks would prove straightforward: though the main site has had to move its servers after Amazon withdrew hosting, and change its web address after EveryDNS cancelled Wikileaks' account, it is still up and running. Duplicate copies of Wikileaks are now loaded hundreds of different servers worldwide. Even PayPal's closure of Wikileaks' account has so far proved little more than an annoyance.
But even these could all vanish tomorrow, thanks to an even more traditional fallback: old media. The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais are all running Wikileaks material.
All shared the same editorial judgement as Wikileaks having seen the material: they judged it in the public interest and chose to run it. At this point, these sites are running the same cables as Wikileaks. They have contributed to the redactions.
The Guardian website, at the time of writing, actually contains more US material than Wikileaks' own. None have faced the political or technical backlash of the main Wikileaks site, yet all would have to be taken offline to bury the Embassy Cables story.
Yet the ineffectiveness of the censorship efforts from the US Government and some stupid senators does not detract from their troubling nature. In a sense, attempts by senator Lieberman and the French government to prevent web hosts providing servers to Wikileaks are the least problematic issue — in the print press era, printers and distributors were regularly targeted with lawsuits when governments or private individuals sought to prevent stories getting out.
Greek dissident bloggers are arrested for exercising the right to free expression and are jailed on grotesque charges, such as treason, after sham trials. Graecokleptocrats are trying to take away Greeks' right to read what they want, and to say what they want. The Internet is making it possible for new voices to be heard, the voices of Greeks who simply could not afford to publish their ideas to a wide audience using the mainstream media. Graecokleptocrats fear new voices, and are trying to control what appears on the Greek blogosphere through new stupid laws and freakish regulations. Greek cybercops must be abolished now.
Targeting web hosts is merely the modern take on an old trick; and one which doesn't seem to work nearly so well in the web era. Controversial publications which lack Wikileaks' audience and resilience, on the other hand, may be anxiously watching current developments.
What is newer — and disturbing — is attempts by governments to prevent millions of their citizens from reading this material. America's federal government employees have been told not to read the cables material — or any publication containing them. Agencies have added virtually every mainstream news outlet to web filters and blocks, a move reminiscent of China's Great Firewall.
Students at some colleges have been advised not to comment on the cables, if they want a government job. And a US data visualisation company, Tableau, has even retracted derivative works based on the Wikileaks stories, without receiving a single specific request to do so.
The US government's efforts to stop this story show both a distressing lack of commitment to the core internet principles of transparency and neutrality, and also a fundamental lack of understanding of its infrastructure. Recent events should not disturb only journalists or campaigners – based on their recent public comments, it should prove a cause for concern for a pair of prominent Americans, too.
The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in West, companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our Graecoroman culture. Consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles.
Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government — and nothing else. It does not mean the right to demand the financial support or the material means to express your views at the expense of other men who may not wish to support you. Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists. A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort. Private citizens cannot use physical force or coercion; they cannot censor or suppress anyone's views or publications. Only the government can do so. And censorship is a concept that pertains only to governmental action.
There is no such thing as symbolic speech. You do not have the right to parade through the public streets or to obstruct public thoroughfares. You have the right of assembly, yes, on your own property, and on the property of your adherents or your friends. But nobody has the right to clog the streets. The streets are only for passage. People should be forbidden to lie down on city pavements. They lie down across a street and cause dreadful traffic snarls, in order to display their views, to attract attention, to register a protest. They may speak, yes. They may not take action at whim on public property.
Defend the rights of individuals to unrestricted freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right of individuals to dissent from government itself. Oppose any abridgment of the freedom of speech through government censorship, regulation or control of communications media.
The government does not have the right to stop obscenity, including pornography, as we hold this to be an abridgment of liberty of expression despite claims that it instigates rape or assault, or demeans and slanders women. The government cannot gag forums, internet groups, electronic bulletin boards, communications networks, and other interactive electronic media as we hold them to be the functional equivalent of speaking halls and printing presses in the age of electronic communications, and as such deserving of full freedom.
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