The United States has blocked Americans’ access to an entire Web site.

Really.

Wikileaks is a site where whistleblowers can anonymously post information and documents showing their companies or governments are engaged in illegal activities.

In one case, Rudolf Elmer, former COO of the Swiss banking group Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands operation, posted such documents purporting to show that the bank was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. The bank’s lawyers convinced Judge Jeffery White of California (still trying to find out which court specifically) to order that the site’s domain registrar, Dynadot, remove the site’s hosting records.

In plain English, that means that if you try to go to wikileaks.org, your computer won’t know where that is. Try it. The Wikileaks people weren’t even given enough notice to appear at the hearing.

Wow.

And, according to the BBC,

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account".

The order also demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name" to be handed over.

But you can still access the site easily — you just have to go to one of the alternative Wikileaks sites, such as

http://wikileaks.cx 

or

http://wikileaks.be

or go to the IP address directly.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Read more at Daily Kos.

Read the text of the injunction. (PDF)

Read the documents that are the cause of the hubbub.

I wrote already that I was happy to be Comcast-free in large part because I don’t think Comcast should be telling me what I’m allowed to use the Internet for (any more than my phone company has the right to tell me what I can say to the people I call).

Comcast, for those who missed it, has a policy of restricting Bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent is a terrific way for sharing large files, because it spreads the pain of delivering those files among lots of people. If you want to download demos of new games, or a version of Linux, Bittorrent is the way to go.

But it’s also used for music and movie piracy, so Comcast decided to limit all Bittorrent traffic by essentially flooding Bittorrent users’ connections with bogus data.

When accused of this, first the company denied it. (I.e., it flat-out lied.) Then the Associated Press, the EFF, and some others proved it was being done. The the FCC started an investigation. Now Comcast is defending the practice it said it wasn’t engaged in.

Ergo, screw them.

To paraphrase John Gilmore, the Internet interprets this kind of bullshit as damage and routes around it. In this case, per TorrentFreak:

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs.

It amazes me on a regular basis that companies and organizations think they really can stop a large number of users from doing what they want to. There comes a point where companies have to realize where the river is going and then realize they have to work with that flow.

At times, Bittorrent accounts for something like 25 to 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Think about that. Comcast really thought it could throttle that kind of usage? Clearly users want Bittorrent, and interfering with it would only mean those users would come up with a way around Comcast’s roadblocks.

The future, to any reasonable person, was obvious; Comcast wouldn’t stop it for long, and it would generate a lot of bad press in the meantime.

Every now and again you read a story about, say, a teacher who suspends a student for leaving class to talk to his father in Iraq. We all know how that will end up — outcry, apology, embarrassment — and I wonder why the teacher couldn’t see the obvious. Ditto for Comcast. Did it really think it would get away with this for long?

Probably. The music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson. It continues to sue its customers while not providing them what they obviously want: unprotected music they can play wherever they want to. And then it’s shocked — shocked — that vastly more music is acquired by piracy than legally.

A few quotes from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching are appropriate:

If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

and

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

and finally

Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.
If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.

(Via Fark)