Wikileaks Censorship has Inverse Affect
Monday, February 18th, 2008
So apparently there’s this website Wikileaks who recently got censored by a California judge.
The funny thing is that I hadn’t even heard about until now. I recall seeing a few articles in my RSS feeds that mentioned Wikileaks but it never really triggered a response for me to read them. I didn’t really look into what it was until I saw it mentioned on Daring Fireball.
The interesting part is that the link I discovered it through is in itself a link to boing boing, which is then referencing another site. Basically the news causes a chain reaction on the internet, since it ends up on high traffic places like boing boing and then just about everybody else starts mentioning or finding out about it like me.
I wonder what they attempt to accomplish since there’s a ton of alternate domain names across many countries, not to mention using the IP address directly, that you can use to still read all the material on Wikileaks. They couldn’t get an injunction on the hosting since I believe it’s hosted outside of the US. Wikileaks was also given almost no warning, and didn’t even have representation in the hearing.
So now that they’ve censored it, they probably just increased the visibility of the site instead of what they intended. And I just found some excellent evidence of that: Graph of blog posts mentioning ‘wikileaks’ in past 90 days
UPDATE: Looks like it probably hit just about every major news site, it was on digg and slashdot, which both have the readership to destroy a web server.