if you make a certain piece of knowledge forbidden, everyone will want to know what it is.

[jose v]

Wikileaks Supporters Clone the Site: 1000 times over!
On the Internet, Suppression = Proliferation

Once again the Internet proves that nothing gives a big boost to something quite like active efforts to suppress it. It is strange that the powers-that-be don't seem to "get" this even now. All the attempts to kill the Wikileaks website have resulted in clones of the site popping up everywhere. The following article states that the number cloned sites has now risen to over 1000! The suppression has led directly to massive proliferation!

This is witness to the fact that there are millions of people out there who detest secrecy and will actually do something to fight against it. The Internet has brought to so many the taste of wide-open freedom of speech and people have liked that so much that they don't want to give it up. The fight is on now for Internet freedom and it is a fight as significant as the American and French Revolutions and the ending of the Soviet Union and all the other freedom struggles in our human history.

I think the first time I realized this paradoxical effect of suppression attempts was some years back when some hacker had cracked the copy-protection scheme of DVDs. (At least I think it was DVD protection, or maybe it was HD DVDs).

In anycase the cracking of the copy-protection involved a kind of "magic number," a series of digits that acted like a key to unlock a DVD and allow copies to be made. Those whose system had been cracked then made a huge effort to suppress the publishing of this number, trying to shut down sites which published it, trying to make it illegal to publish the magic number, sending out legal letters, and so on.

The effort to make a "number" illegal backfired massively. Suddenly everyone started publishing this number. People were offering tee shirts for sale with the number emblazoned on them. For many days this magic number became the most "Googled" thing on the Internet. The attempts to remove it from the Internet made it appear all over the place. The lesson was simple: if you make a certain piece of knowledge forbidden, everyone will want to know what it is.

Below page 1 of a current article at the Washington Post
LINK

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WikiLeaks avoids shutdown as supporters worldwide go on the offensive
By Joby Warrick and Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 8, 2010; 10:53 PM

Over the past several days, the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks has been hit with a series of blows that have seemed to threaten its survival. Its primary Web address was deactivated, its PayPal account was frozen, and its Internet server gave it the boot.

The result: WikiLeaks is now stronger than ever, at least as measured by its ability to publish online.

Blocked from using one Internet host, WikiLeaks simply jumped to another. Meanwhile, the number of "mirror" Web sites - effectively clones of WikiLeaks' main contents pages - grew from a few dozen last week to 200 by Sunday. By early Wednesday, the number of such sites surpassed 1,000.

At the same time, WikiLeaks' supporters have apparently gone on the offensive, staging retaliatory attacks against Internet companies that have cut ties to the group amid fears they could be associated with it. On Wednesday, hackers briefly shut down access to the Web sites for MasterCard and Visa, both of which had announced they had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual-assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated setbacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Experts, including some of the modern online world's chief architects, say the very design of the Web makes it difficult for WikiLeaks' opponents to shut it down for more than a few hours.

"The Internet is an extremely open system with very low barriers to access and use," said Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and the co-author of the TCP/IP system, the basic language of computer-to-computer communication over the Internet. "The ease of moving digital information around makes it very difficult to suppress once it is accessible."

Thus, despite the global uproar over the release of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, Assange's Web site remained defiantly intact Wednesday. Over the past week it has continued to publish a steady stream of leaked State Department documents with little visible evidence of injury from repeated, anonymous cyber-attacks or the multiple attempts to cut off its access to funding and Web resources.

By contrast, companies that have pulled the plug on WikiLeaks have suffered publicly, with cyber-attacks rendering their Web sites inaccessible or slow for hours at a time.

While a group of "hacktivists" targeted MasterCard and Visa - part of "Operation Payback," they called it - anonymous assailants have also in recent days attacked PayPal, which severed relations with WikiLeaks citing violations of its terms of service.

Web sites for Swedish prosecutors and a Swedish lawyer have also been hit, as has the banking arm of the Swiss postal service, which said it had frozen Assange's account, and even the Web site of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

WikiLeaks' seeming invulnerability is seen by experts as a demonstration of the power of new Web-based media to take on not only governments but also the traditional news media.

SOURCE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/08/AR2...

PAGE TWO OF THIS ARTICLE IS HERE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/08/AR2...