Does it matter if the government can open first-class mail without a warrant?

There was a bit of a flap about privacy today, though I’m not sure how many people noticed it: according to some newspaper and television reports, a signing statement attached to a Postal Reform bill signed by President Bush in late December may have created a mechanism allowing the government to open first-class mail without […]

A contrarian view: maybe the video of Saddam’s execution was a good thing after all…

In case it matters to you, I did not watch the video of Saddam’s execution — nor do I intend to. But after mulling the situation over for the past couple of days, I’ve come to a contrarian conclusion: it was probably a good thing, and we should encourage more examples of it.
I realize that […]

Iraq blogs

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry entitled “Iraq and Web 2.0,” and suggested that we might be better informed if we pursued grass-roots Web 2.0-style sources of inforrmation, rather than top-down, controlled channels of information from mainstream news media and official government statements.
The events of the past few days have demonstrated that, […]

What happens when an entire country is blocked from accessing important Internet resources?

An article on TechCrunch (”Wikipedia Bans Qatar“) caught my attention this evening, so I followed the conveniently provided link to see what Wikipedia had to say about the situation.
The problem, it seems, is that Qatar has only one ISP that provides high-speed Internet access; and that effectively means every Internet user in the country shares […]