Turkey's lingering reputation for authoritarianism hardly does justice to the increasingly free and democratic country it has become. Still, some troubling examples of a repressive mind-set remain. One of the most striking is the government's 2-year-old ban on YouTube.

After typing www.youtube.com into a browser in Turkey, you see a blank page with the bright red words "Access to this site has been blocked by order of the court." In 2007, a Greek youth posted a video titled "Ataturk Gay Turk," which claimed, with the help of cartoon flowers, fake tears and a singsong voice, that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, was gay. The Turkish government responded by banning YouTube, while ordinary Turkish citizens did their part by posting video after video documenting the long history of "Gay-reek" homosexuality.

People with any technical skill can avoid the ban with ease, either by viewing YouTube through a proxy server, or by changing their DNS settings to make it appear they are in another country. Turkey's prime minister once absent-mindedly referred in a speech to a YouTube video he had seen. Despite many anti-Turkish groups, Facebook is still used by millions of Turks.

Lazy enforcement has generally meant lazy protests. The cleverest and most recent exception is a new campaign from the organization "Censor Censorship." It began with a series of videos from director Ilkay Kopan. In the first (available on YouTube where YouTube is available) a man walks hurriedly into a bathroom, unzips his fly, stops, then walks out swearing. The camera pans to a sign across the urinals reading "Access to these urinals is blocked by order of the court." Another features a woman at the grocery store whose desire for deli meat is thwarted by a sign blocking access to the shelf. "What did the sausages do?" she wonders as the spot ends.

The campaign has now spilled from the Internet into real life. Visitors to the Censor Censorship Web site ( www.sansuresansur.org) can print out signs and stickers reading, "Access to this

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is blocked by order of the court." So far, participants have used their signs to block access to escalators, payphones, benches, streets, text messages, kokorech (a greasy late-night snack made from fried, spiced lamb intestine), classrooms and the city of Istanbul.

Censorship has a unique ability to confuse the serious and the absurd. The same Turkish courts that blocked the Web site of British atheist Richard Dawkins also blocked moonamtrak.com, which features pictures of people mooning Amtrak.

Turkish internet cafes ban two kinds of sites: pornographic and Kurdish separatist. Until recently, it would have been easy to dismiss YouTube as being in the same category as pornography and moonamtrak - free speech in principle but inane in practice. As Iranian protesters demonstrated, though, the medium has its serious side.

As Turkey's army vigilantly defends the border with Greece, Turkish courts have ceded control of the country's Internet to any Greek teenager with a computer. It is an elegant lesson in the self-defeating nature of censorship for developing and developed democracies alike.

Nick Danforth blogs for the Project on Middle East Democracy.

This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle