Cryptome vanished a little over four hours ago (though there is still a mirror up), to be replaced by an empty directory listing. I hope nothing happened to them. I only noticed so quickly because my aggregator started throwing errors when trying to pull their RSS feed, which made me start to wonder if being syndicated is a partial defense against being "disappeared" by someone who doesn't want your site up, in that people running aggregators are more likely to notice an error message than a missing site they only visit irregularly, or makes the situation worse in that it discourages the general readers from visiting the site directly, and thus only noticing the problem due to lack of news in the feed.

Of course, websites (even controversial ones) go up and down for reasons completely unrelated to government interference, and it's quite likely that the man running it is simply having technical difficulties, but it got my attention nonetheless.

Update: The site now says "Cryptome is moving to a new Verio/NTT server. Full site transfer completed by end of day. It was meant to be seamless, uninterrupted, transparent. Hah!" Just technical difficulties after all.