March 12, 2008 12:07PM # Rate​My​Cop​.com Enjoying Streisand Effect By [Jim Harper](https://www.cato.org/people/jim-harper) --- SHARE A site for community review of police officers called [Rate​My​Cop​.com](http://www.ratemycop.com/) gets the benefit of the “[Streisand effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)” today. For a period of time, it was shut down by its web registrar, GoDad​dy​.com, [most likely because of law enforcement complaints about being subject to public oversight](http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/godaddy-silence.html). (The “Streisand effect” is the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove information from the Internet backfires, causing it to be more widely publicized. The term refers to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and Web site in an attempt to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. [The lawsuit made the photo very popular](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030624/1231228.shtml).) ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Technology and Privacy](https://www.cato.org/technology-privacy), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).