Maybe the biggest concern is the half-sensed prospect of genuine citizen participation in government. Enough to send shivers down the spine of any politician or bureaucrat.

Egypt is the latest country to feel the censorship urge.

It seems that Judge Abdel Fattah Morad, head of Alexandria Appeal Court, has started a lawsuit against the government in Egypt’s Administrative Courts in order to block a number of Egyptian websites. The list, 21-websites-long, includes the blogs and sites that took part in the discussion around the book the Judge has written, and the wide plagiarism evident in the book copying HRInfo’s report on Internet Freedoms in the Arab World, and a how-to-blog guide written by blogger Bent Masreya.

Expect a growing muttering from governments everywhere about the need to regulate the net to fix ill-defined problems to do with intellectual property, public decency, privacy, and most of all, national security (those damn terrurists done sent emails to each other, you know).

Its about time, I say!

I clearly remember when Don Finlayson told Abigail that he was homosexual. Right then and there I said there ought to be a law about that.

You are Fred Nile, and I claim my five pounds.

I clearly remember when Don Finlayson told Abigail that he was homosexual. Right then and there I said there ought to be a law about that.

This country has been going to the dogs ever since. Freedom of speech is all very well if you have something sensible to say.

See http://www.deadroo.com/index.php/participation/ and subsequent posts (with the tag Democracy) for details – then maybe do something similar within your own discussion groups.

Spending 5% of your normal blogging time reading and commenting to the “official parliamentary blog” would make a difference.

my blog is definitely rated MA15 , but only because infantile minds like Coonan’s would not want to understand half of it.