Nine months ago, I traveled to Beijing with my wife for a genetics conference. It was my first time outside of North America, and although I studied Chinese culture extensively during my undergraduate years, I still found it difficult not to take some of the Western propaganda baggage along with me. Over my two-week stay, and limited travel to anything other than tourist traps, I found the experience to be a mixed-bag. Beijing is a lot like Washington, D.C. With dozens of historical monuments paying homage to past leaders, the city draws Chinese tourists from all over the country every day. It’s polluted, visible poverty is rampant, and it can be treacherous to navigate as a foreigner. Again, not unlike our own D.C. But there’s one key difference. When I visited D.C. about 20 years ago (I was a little squirt), I remember looking through our tour bus window at some protest near the capitol steps. There were chants, singing, shouting and picket signs a-plenty. And it was all considered business-as-usual to the on-lookers. In fact, this right to protest is considered part and parcel of our American democratic process. Not so in China. The last mass protest in Beijing was on June 4th, 1989 at Tiananmen Square where the government responded with military action leaving over 1000 civilians dead. Suffice to say, I saw no protests as I toured downtown Beijing.

Back in my hotel room, the mass media was much the same. Picture 100 cable channels with Chinese versions of everything we have in the States. Chinese MTV, Chinese Discovery Channel, Chinese Ren & Stimpy, and so on. Except for news. Every single news channel was essentially a Chinese version of Fox News. It was crazy! And don’t get me started on the internet. Every web search was filtered and any content that was not government-approved was blocked. When I got back home to the States, I remember making The Largest Minority the first website I visited. It was my way of celebrating my return, knowing that my visit to the site would be unfiltered and unrestricted. You see, in my mind, criticism of your government is not just a right, but it’s a necessary form of participation. Democracy simply does not work without protest.

Over the last decade, in the aftermath of 9/11, Americans seem to be forgetting this. Protest and criticism of the government is increasingly being considered un-patriotic. As a result, we’ve watched many of our basic freedoms slowly eroded. Privacy and due process have been hacked and slashed through the Patriot Act, but only recently has freedom of speech been so directly assaulted.

From the Global Integrity Commons article:

“Tuesday, February 19, 2008
U.S. Court Order Shuts Down Wikileaks.org

Incredibly, Wikileaks.org, an organization devoted to exposing corruption, has been muzzled by a U.S. court order (pdf download). Rather than attack a specific finding or document, the court has ordered their DNS registrar to essentially erase the organization’s website from the Web. While wikileaks.org is down, their site can be found via IP addess: http://88.80.13.160, which is hosted in Sweden.

The order comes at the request of a Swiss bank, Bank Julius Baer, and its Cayman Islands subsidiary who had been implicated in allegedly laundering money by documents posted on wikileaks.org. A recap of Wikileaks coverage of Bank Julius Baer is mirrored here.

I have had several conversations via email with people at Wikileaks as they worked to get their organization started up. I have been deeply impressed with the quality of their early work, and am genuinely shocked at this shutdown order. The U.S. joins China and Thailand in censoring the wikileaks.org website.

From the beginning, the Wikileaks folks have been expecting this kind of reaction all along, and have put serious thought into how to evade this kind of treatment. I thought they were being conspiratorial. I was wrong. I am confident that this will not slow them or their mission. ”

When I read stuff like this, I wonder how far from the brink we really are as a country. How many more Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlets do we need? How many more websites need to be erased?