Only a few days after the British “piracy police” shut down the proxy service called Immunicity and arrested its owner, the service (or its clones, to be precise) resurrected. Just like the original service, the new ones allow Internet users to access The Pirate Bay and other blocked websites completely free of charge.
Original Immunicity launched back in 2013, with its owner claiming that he set up the service as a protest against increasing censorship efforts in the country. His motivation came from the famous John Gilmore quote that you could find on the main page of Immunicity: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. This is what the proxy service strived to offer.
People who set up their browser to work with this UK service could gain access to blocked websites by running their traffic via its proxy server. It took them just a few clicks to unblock any censored website, hassle free.
Immunicity has been there for more than a year and helped tens of thousands of people to access censored portals, but was shut down a few days ago. Following the complaints from copyright holders, City of London Police labeled Immunicity a criminal operation, shut down the service and arrested its 20-year-old owner.
Apparently, they tried to send a deterrent message and make it harder for the public to access blocked websites. However, it brought just the opposite result. Mere days after the original proxy service was taken offline, multiples clones have emerged: two of them are Immunicity.co.uk and Immun.es, both offering the same unblocking functionality for everyone and for free.
This once again showed the UK police that censorship enforcement may lead to counterproductive results. The operator of Immum.es admitted he has taken the necessary precautions to hide his identity when purchasing both the domain and server. The new website uses a hosting service allowing proxies and offers unmetered bandwidth – all of this should guarantee smooth operation. It is also known that the backend is coded in node.js, which might be released as open source later.
As you can see, the end result is that the actions of the British “pirate police” only have made matters worse, from their own perspective. They got rid of one Immunicity, but got two instead, and many more may come in the future.
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