Censorship on the part of a private body is nothing new, and completely acceptable. If the owner/controllers of a website don't want certain content on their site then they are completely within their rights to remove it.<p>This is a meta-article. It has a small amount of value to Slashdot as content, but then a massive negative value for its nature concerning the gaming of an online community, which Slashdot is.<p>It'd be like posting a guide to DDOSing vBulletin on a vBulletin forum.<p>It's fair enough to post the content on a lone website, but not in an online community. You can claim that knowledge of the article is harmless, and will inform the public, but it won't stop people trying to use it as a set of guidelines. And is that worth all of Slashdots time to clean up? No.<p>But ultimately, it's a private site, they can do what they want. If you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
They're talking about it over on Metafilter.<p><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/118170" rel="nofollow">http://www.metafilter.com/118170</a><p>Part of the reason it may have been deleted is because it probably has nothing to do with the government, and because as a document, it's been kicking around (and publicly available) for at least 4 years.<p>I was initially super excited that it was knowledge too powerful even for SlashDot, but the opposite may be true.
The mentioned post did spend a good amount of time on the HN frontpage yesterday: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4277278" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4277278</a>
Here's some Slashdot Moderators talking about the fact they didn't delete it:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/wzmdu/censored_slashdot_post_describes_in_explicit/c5hzate" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/wzmdu/censored_s...</a>