In the annals of the net, one of the sacred texts is John Gilmore's aphorism that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". Mr Gilmore is a celebrated engineer, entrepreneur and libertarian activist, who is regarded by the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and men in suits everywhere as a pain in the ass. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes. These include: creating the "alt" (for alternative) hierarchy in the Usenet discussion fora; open-source software; drugs law reform; philanthropy; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which last week won a notable concession from the Library of Congress to legalise the "jailbreaking" of one's iPhone – ie liberating it from Apple's technical shackles).
The Gilmore aphorism about censorship first saw the light of day in 1993 – in a Time article about the internet – and since then has taken on a life of its own as a consoling mantra about the libertarian potential of the network. "In its original form," Gilmore explains, "it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route." But, he continues, "The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship."
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