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Comment by ENOTTY | Hacker News Reader

>France and United States, which always criticized China and other regimes due their policies on freedom of expression, are doing the same now

This is a terrible comparison. In China, if you publish something like Wikileaks, the government will order your webhost to take it down and then send goons out to take you away. In the US, one senator basically sent letters or publicly asked companies not to cooperate. No evidence of any threat to harm people.

Sure it is a curtailing of freedom of speech, much like prohibiting yelling fire in a theater is, but its not on the order of China.

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Just to play devil's advocate: Isn't the end result basically the same, though? The commercial entities in the US ultimately took the content down. They may or may not have had to, technically/legally, but the fact remains that they did.

That companies obeyed this "request" from the government only empowers the government further - and as soon as someone eventually pushes back against this kind of thing, a law or technicality will be found making such push-back illegal because, hey, they used to get away with these requests all the time and it totally must have been making the country safer! We wouldn't want to give that important national security power up! Let's make it official! And then boom - we're just like China.

Sure it is a curtailing of freedom of speech, much like prohibiting yelling fire in a theater is

It's nothing like that. Unless you're talking about one person in one theater yelling fire and getting persecuted for it while a dozen+ others in a dozen+ other theaters (NYTimes, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais to name just a handful) sit back and "get away" with the exact same activity.

Of course, it's also nothing like yelling fire in a theater because there is no evidence that releasing these documents is a direct threat to the safety of anyone, as yelling fire in a theater is.

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