Wired on Friday: Late last month, the New York Times published one of the more extensive analyses of the investigation into the alleged "liquid bomb" plot.
As befits that paper's investigative team, it contained interviews with uniquely placed (and sometimes anonymous) authorities from London, New York and Pakistan, and revealed many details previously unreported in the press.
In the United Kingdom, these details will continue to go unreported.
The New York Times voluntarily chose to withdraw distribution of that day's edition in the UK. On its website, British readers will find the page - which is titled Details Emerge in British Terror Case - blocked, a small and apologetic error message replacing the entire content of the article.
The technology the Times editorial staff used to do this is a borrowing from their marketing department. The same software that uses the internet address of the reader to guess their geographical location - all the better to serve them localised advertising - was turned around to block the article text when it detected a British reader.
Geolocation, as its known, works well enough when selling cars or holidays, but it's not a perfect mapper of place.
Some in the UK could see the article through their workplace's multinational corporate networks. In a colonial twist, New York Times readers in Singapore and Hong Kong found themselves cordoned off as suspected Brits.
But it did well enough for the New York Times to declare itself happy with the filtering, and declare that the filtering would remain up until the detention and (if charged) trial of the suspects was concluded.
The newspaper's aim was to avoid the accusation of - and perhaps prosecution regarding - sub judice. Prejudicing an ongoing case in the UK is a serious matter of contempt of court, and the publications of details of the defendants or the evidence collected in the investigation is presumed to do just that.
It goes without saying that publication outside of the UK is untouchable by the British courts, but nonetheless, the Times felt that making itself viewable within the UK would risk its assets in that country, and could even lead to its employees in Britain being imprisoned.
In many ways, it was more of a sop to the UK authorities than a practical impediment to British citizens seeking to read the story.
The internet, in networking pioneer John Gilmore's phrasing, "perceives censorship as damage and routes around it".
At the physical layer of the net, that is not literally true - the modern internet is rather inflexible in the finer-grained mechanics of its routing. But at the larger, societal level, its communal resistance to filtering or blocking remains intact.
A determined and net-savvy New York Times reader, finding themselves on the wrong end of the block, could circumvent the filtering in minutes. They could install free software such as Tor or Anonymizer, or use public web "proxies" - websites in other countries that will fetch and re-present the web page for you, effectively bypassing the newspaper's detection.
Even a casual net surfer would have numerous chances to read the article, especially as hundreds of users have chosen to republish the story on their own unfiltered sites - either in ignorance of the Times self-imposed ban, or in defiance .
Not every voice online was happy at this routing around of the Times. Many British voices, upset at the presumption of netizens breaking UK law, were upset that online coverage would provoke a mistrial, either because they wanted the suspects to have a fair trial, or else because they had already determined their guilt and did not want them to be let off scot-free.
The general concern seemed to revolve around the "free speech absolutism" of the US, where trials and verdicts are acted out in the sensationalist media and television long before they reach the courts.
But, in the face of the internet, can we continue to close off facts and opinions at their point of distribution? The New York Times's web readership is about two million daily worldwide.
One of the larger of the internet's blogs is Boing Boing, which also has a two million daily readership, and which regularly publishes details of how to bypass national filters, mainly for its Chinese readership and those behind corporate firewalls.
So the information about how to get around the filter is, from one site alone, as available as the New York Times. And even that number grows when you consider the totality of other smaller blogs and e-mailers passing the message across British borders.
When saucy internal e-mails are forwarded millions of times over, who couldn't compete with the New York Times for half-secret information dispersal?
Most British readers might presume that the Times piece was a salacious list of terrorist rabble rousing. They'll have to take my word for it when I say that it was not.
It was a well-balanced but revealing piece that raised serious questions about the timing and necessity of the terrorism alerts, with quotes provided by high-ranking officials on both sides of the Atlantic.
British lawyers who saw the piece questioned whether it would seriously breach sub judice at all; an opinion somewhat confirmed when the Daily Mail and London Times published far more one-sided extracts and summaries from the piece in subsequent days.
By self-censoring, the New York Times set itself a troubling precedent: a willingness to muzzle their truth for the sake of local law.
But worse, they handicapped the truth against the spread of biased or half-truths.
Perhaps part of the paper's reasoning was to protect those high-placed British sources who leaked details of an ongoing investigation from the punishment of their own law.
Rather than make a futile attempt to silence the world's presses and hold back the internet, the British might do better hearing the full story, and then - if it was felt to be necessary - set about finding out why their own officials see fit to give the rest of the world a story they are forbidden to hear.
•Danny O'Brien is the activist coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
