John Gilmore said, famously, “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” It’s an eloquent warning to anyone who wants to censor Internet postings or even whole web sites and it’s a metaphor. What really happens is that censorship excites curiosity and it’s curiosity that routes itself around censorship as best it can.

The recent attempt to censor YouTube by Pakistan ended badly. Pakistan Telecom poisoned the DNS service for local ISPs so that people in Pakistan trying to access YouTube would get no connection. It then made the mistake of publishing that DNS table to its international data carrier, PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong, which in turn published it across the world. The DNS poisoning spread from there and knocked out YouTube for a few hours. So if you didn’t know that the Domain Name System (DNS) doesn’t check the information it gets from authoritative servers, you do now.

DNS poisoning is carried out by many countries as a form of censorship, but no country has ever let the poison spread like Pakistan did. A Pakistan Telecommunications Authority spokesman claimed that Pakistan was trying to ban access to a trailer for a new film by Geert Wilders, which is said to portray Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals. No doubt the trailer will now find its way onto many different web sites and will be viewed by 100 times as many people (especially Pakistanis) who would otherwise have had no interest.

This is what is dubbed the Streisand Effect, named for Barbara Streisand, who sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for US$50 million in the hope of preventing an aerial photo of her house from being displayed on the web. The photo (click here to see) is boring at best, but it immediately became popular, has been posted on many web sites and can now be considered a monument to John Gilmore.

The Streisand Effect

The Streisand Effect is well known, but not yet well known enough. Here are some of the organizations and people that need to take a crash course:

• The UK’s Commission for Racial Equality accused the comic book Tintin In The Congo, written in 1931 by Herge of being racially offensive (which it probably is) and immediately turned it into a best seller. It climbed to No 8 on Amazon’s most popular books list.
• The Church of Scientology tried to get web sites to delete a video of Tom Cruise advocating Scientology in what was supposed to be a video for church members only. It not only failed but provoked a backlash.
• Disney, IBM and Microsoft jointly issued a cease and desist letter to news portal Digg.com because it provided links to an article that published an encryption code that could be used to break electronic locks on HD-DVDs. Digg initially responded by taking the postings down, but Digg users wouldn’t play along. They inundated Digg with postings that contained the code, published photos with the code on it, sold T-Shirts with the code on it and even wrote a song with the code in it, and performed the song in a video that was viewed over 200,000 times on YouTube
• The King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, felt insulted when portrayed in a YouTube video with feet superimposed over his head. The Thai government banned the site, causing a rash of YouTube videos directly aimed at insulting the king.

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