Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
You bring up a valid concern (especially in the U.S.), and your timing is uncanny; see this thread and read up on COICA for why. |
It's the COICA stuff that brought all this to my attention; it'd bounced around the discussion groups I'm in, and I'd mentioned not being much worried about it, because of the
Cute Cats Theory of the Internet. Any big gov't (or any other group) attempt to shut down large "infringing" sites (whether infringing means copyright, trademark, sedition, hate speech, or state secrets) is going to be met with outcry from a lot of people who were using those resources to share pictures of their cats.
(Wikileaks was perhaps not used so much for cats. But the wikileaks *data* is still available, mirrored across a dozen filesharing sites & methods. Shutting down the central repository just means less gov't awareness of what's going on; the info's still being swapped around.)
Of course, given the Grokster & Pirate Bay rulings, it's fairly clear that gov'ts are more interested in punishing facilitators than people actually breaking the laws they claim are important. (It's so *hard* to track down individuals. And they're doing so little, each of them; easier to stomp on the people who help them find each other. Because that will certainly discourage anyone else from stepping up to help them find each other, right?)
I'm firmly in agreement that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it;" neither laws nor code is going to stop data exchange.
There *is* info that isn't available online--because the people who have it, are convinced of the importance of secrecy. The problem with gov't docs is that employees often aren't so much convinced about the importance of secrecy as they are afraid of the consequences of getting caught leaking info. And eventually, someone's going to take that risk.