Today’s cartoon contains an easter egg and a couple of embedded links. Move your mouse pointer over the image to find them. You need to be viewing the cartoon at the original site for them to work.

Fahrenheit 451 predicted a future where teams of government firemen were sent out to destroy books which were considered to promote dangerous thoughts in the populace and were therefore illegal. In modern times, the Internet is the boogeyman of state control of the populace. Criticize the government and you may be silenced. We hand over a tremendous amount of power to our governments. Do they not therefore deserve the highest level of scrutiny of any organizations? Who will watch the watchers if we fail to do so?

Wikileaks is a site that reports the stories of government whistle-blowers. They were taken off-line rather suddenly and without a chance to defend themselves after a case was brought by a Swiss bank. The action seemed particularly heavy-handed, not only requiring the documents in question to be removed, but the entire site was ordered to be made inaccessible via the Wikilinks.org URL.

Recently a site called RateMyCop was dropped rather suddenly by GoDaddy web hosting after complaints by police. This wasn’t a government act and I recognize a private business’ right to stop doing business with someone, but that doesn’t change the fact that the act was rude and disrespectful of their customer. It’s also quite possible they lied about their reasons. If you read the linked article, I think you’ll agree they could at least have handled the decision more professionally, not to mention that it was a poor decision in the first place.

These seem like excellent sites to me and I hope they continue to attract support. However, if we disagree with what someone has to say, if we feel someone isn’t telling the truth, we shouldn’t stifle what they have to say. The best way to counter a falsehood is with the truth. We don’t need less speech. We need more speech.