Despite the clampdown on protesters, images and video continue to leak out onto the internet documenting clashes between protesters and police.

In the beginning, China wanted to show the world that they are not restrictive on local media outlets. Another image China has been wanting to show off to the world during the Olympics is that China is harmonious. With Tibet uprisings, protests, clashes with the police, blacking out of foreign media showing the demonstrations and preventing foreign journalists from entering areas around Tibet, the protests have become a public relations nightmare for the Chinese government. As it stands right now, trying to look like an open and harmonious society has become little more than a dream at this point in time. This week, things are not improving for this ideal imagery either.

Just last week, reports surfaced that China is posting wanted ads in major Chinese web portals for 21 rioters.

It seems that the clampdown is continuing as an article in the Guardian shows:

A senior Chinese government official has said that he welcomes closer international ties to develop the country’s burgeoning digital media sector, but also delivered a stark warning to foreigners not to use “internet issues” to meddle in China’s “internal affairs”.

[...]

These misunderstandings have arisen for reasons including a “lack of knowledge” of Chinese government policies by foreign companies or cultural differences, Mingzhao added.

“[We are] willing to draw useful lessons from other countries to improve ways of building and regulating the internet,” he said, before adding a strong word of caution. “Any attempt to use internet issues to interfere in China’s internal affairs is definitely opposed”.

A day after this report was published, interestingly enough, another report pointed to how the government has ordered the shutdown of 25 entertainment websites.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or SARFT, said in a statement on its Web site Friday that officials have completed a two-month audit on video entertainment and video sharing Web sites based on the new rules and decided to shut down 25.

Another 32 have been slated to be “punished” – although it wasn’t immediately clear what that entailed. Popular video sharing Web site Tudou.com was one of those listed for punishment. The list included few major players.

According to the report, under the Chinese rules, Chinese websites are prohibited from “broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography”

A rough Google translation of the original news release can be found here.

It seems ironic how tightening control on websites that ‘damage Chinas reputation’ in of itself is damaging China’s reputation – maybe even more so than if there wasn’t a ban in the first place. It may remind some of the plight of the recording industry where they tried everything in their power to shut down p2p services only to have it overwhelmingly promoted instead of stopped.

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What is Wikileaks? Wikipedia describes the site with the following:

Wikileaks is a website running on modified MediaWiki software which allows whistleblowers to release (whilst remaining anonymous) government and corporate documents, allegedly without possible retribution. It claims that postings are untraceable by anyone attempting to do so. It was launched in December 2006 and, as of November 2007, had contained over 1.2 million documents. It provides mirrors which can be used during outages.

It is true, Wikileaks is still accessible with other domains such as wikileaks.cx and wikileaks.be which are among a massive massive list of domains that could be used to access the website still. It appears that only the .org domain was shut down.

DailyKos broke the news yesterday evening saying that, “One of the most important web sites in recent months has been Wikileaks.org. Wikileaks has upset the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta. Wikileaks is now under attack from a censorship effort by a California court.”

The story quickly made it to many sites including the most popular blog BoingBoing where reader Pukebazooka said, “even though this prevents the wikileaks.org link from working, it doesn’t actually take down the site: everything is up and running at 88.80.13.160.”

“Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers.” Stephan Soldz said in a posting on the site, “It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet.”

The injunction itself says, “Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

It seems evident that shutting down the site will require much more effort if it is even possible at all, but some find it troubling that a judge can order a DNS to be taken down so quickly.