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Google exercised its belief in freedom of speech recently, turning down a censorship request by the Canadian government to remove a YouTube video showing a man urinating on his own Canadian passport.

"We received a request from the Passport Canada office to remove a YouTube video of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet," the company revealed."We did not comply with this request," Google said.

Google releases fifth "Transparency Report," claimsmore information means more choice, more freedom

1,801,024 URLs requested to be removed in total

But gov't agencies top lists: In last half of 2011, U.S. gov't. agencies asked Google to censor 6,192 items

Number is increase of 718 percent vs. previous six-month period

But Google had to comply with others: The search giant claims it increasingly fields requests from government agencies trying to use their power to suppress political opinions and other material they don't like.

The details of the Canadian case were released in Google's semi-annual "transparency report" for the last half of 2011, released on Sunday. It was the U.S.-based company's fifthsince 2009, summarizing the company's responses to requests received from governments to remove links to web content alleged to be illegal, hateful, terrorism-promoting, or offensive -- an onslaught of requests that are only increasing, the company said Sunday.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote in a Sunday blog post.

That comment may have been aimed at the U.S., where police prosecutors, courts and other government agencies submitted 187 requests to remove content from July through December last year, more than doubling from 92 requests from January through June.

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Google: Uptick in Censorship