When simple sensorship goes wrong~

Hello everyone thank you for tuning in today. We shall be discussing when hacking + government goes wrong. So imagine yourself in a world where your government decides they do not want their citizens to view certain websites on the internet without your direct knowledge or consent...not to hard to picture I would imagine. Anyways supposing said government decides the only way to accomplish this is to block the website all together from reaching its citizens. How does one accomplish this you ask? Well there is a variety of ways you could in theory come to this conclusion. One of them being officially stating disapproval of this site and urge citizens to stay away from it. Request the website operators from allowing certain IP's coming from said country to access the website ( this would probably be more ethically accepted ). Or you can take matters into your own hands and hack the website and/or your citizens force block this website from accessing. Now you are probably wondering what website and what country would even consider taking steps towards Internet censorship. The website is YouTube, perhaps you have heard of it? You know a little video sharing site where users upload videos for people to watch and comment. And the country in question you ask? Well it is the country of Pakistan. Honestly I did not see that coming.~

What sparked the country wide banning of YouTube came from the recent increase of anti-Islamic type videos that have been popping up recently on YouTube's servers. Pakistan obviously no longer favored such videos being accessible by its citizens decided to take up the ban hammer in its own hands and attempted to block the site from being reached by anyone in their country. Now take a pause before reading on and ask yourself how does one ban a website? Well if you read the first paragraph I gave a couple of scenarios on how this possibly could be done but I am sure you can imagine which scenario Pakistan decided on. Yes they took the unethical approach and hacked into YouTube's servers and attempted Internet protocols that resulted in much more then a simple ban hammer for its citizens. The end result was Pakistan must of miscalculated its attempts at blocking just its nation and ultimately blocking the website to many of its users world wide.

One must question the ethic's in doing this. I can understand that they may want to block it for their own reasons but wouldn't simple communication between YouTube and the Pakistan government been a little simpler than "hijacking" a server? What kind of security threats could this have caused as a result? We all know hacking is hacking, it does not matter if you are stealing information or simply just disabling a website from viewers to see. Steps taken could end in the same way with risks to data integrity. Whose to say there was no hidden agenda? I am not pushing any blame towards anyone but simply asking questions that many would not think to ask. If I were to "hijack" a website to prevent those from viewing it, am I not taking censorship into my hands where the Internet it accessed by all not just by some? What would give me the right to do so?

Protecting data integrity is the goal of all people who run and maintain servers and databases. Is it not a crime in itself to force your way in without authorization and take certain actions into your own hands? These are questions we need to think about as Internet censorship takes steps closer to becoming a possible reality.

All credit goes to G4Tv and Wired News where I learned of and read the article. Both links will be shown below. Until next time everyone~

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/page2.html

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_YOUTUBE_BLOCKED?
SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-02-24-09-04-19