Documents from the Army during World War II arrived with the censor's approval stamp, certifying that no harm would come to the nation if those depictions of life at the front fell into enemy hands. That was the censorship of another time. Everyone understood why it was important and knew that the government needed to control the communication channel from the war zone. But Americans also understood that wartime censorship was anomalous. Though the United States has a history of banning books, Americans generally don't like having the government intercept their communications or decide what they are allowed to know. Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales. Ironically for the American pioneers who expected the Internet to foster unprecedented information freedom, its rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control. In this article, the author discusses censorship and contends that communications giants and wary governments curb Web freedoms.