It's happening. Feds after Google data:

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The auspice here is kiddie porn -- which is a great angle for facists to use: so you don't want google to turn over its data? what, you like looking at little boys? -- but I fully expect homeland-security to do a turn on this cycle sometime soon.

Here's some music that I've been considering pulling from for creating a theme-song-type audio environment for my dark future radio play idea. It's from the extended mix of Orbital's The Box, a 28-minute track. This is about a 5 minute excerpt, does a nice job of creating tension, paranoia, etc:

The Box - Excerpt

Now, if I want to really do this thing, I'll try to use some original music, but part of my idea is to weave in whatever works, and if it's actually already released/copyrighted to do the Dawson's Creek thing and include links to buy the album, claim fair use. Should work unless we get hugely popular, which is a good problem to have.

Another opinion, this from the NYT; the situation should be well known by now:

Even as Internet use explodes in China, Beijing is cracking down on free expression, and Western technology firms are leaping to help. The companies block access to political Web sites, censor content, provide filtering equipment to the government and snitch on users. Companies argue that they must follow local laws, but they are also eager to ingratiate themselves with a government that controls access to the Chinese market.

I'll continue to track what I see about this. I found this to be especially interesting:

Recently Yahoo admitted that it had helped China sentence a dissident to 10 years in prison by identifying him as the sender of a banned e-mail message.

That sent me to google looking for some context, which I found here from the BBC:

According to a translation of his conviction, reproduced by Reporters Without Borders, he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message.

Reporters Without Borders said the message warned journalists of the dangers of social unrest resulting from the return of dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in June 2004.

The actual mechanics here -- someone leaking an internal government communication that the government would rather not have as public knowledge -- has rather obvious and ominous paralells on our side of the Pacific.

The temptation to turn the internet into an apparatus of State control will be no less strong for greedy States than is the temptation for greedy media companies to try and monopolize it. Hopefully the Public will coalesce to resist the inevitable attempts which will come in the 21st Century. This suggestion in the NYT editorial is a good one:

Reporters Without Borders, a group advocating press freedom, recommends that Internet companies also adopt a good conduct code, pledging not to filter out words like "democracy" and "human rights" from search engines and maintaining their e-mail and Internet servers outside China.

Western businesses have always overestimated the price of defending human rights in China. Some have done it effectively - privately and respectfully - and paid no cost. But the beauty of such an industrywide code of conduct for Internet companies is that it would put no company at a disadvantage.

Death With Dignity wins in the Supreme Court. Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissenting. There's little doubt this would have been a 5 - 4 with Alito on the court instead of O'Conner, part of the reason hard-core conservatives want him in the game.

This is something I know a bit about since my mom worked on the campaign in Oregon, where the law was passed. It's a good victory for state's rights, compassion, and rationality. Die-hard conservatives see this as a slippery slope at the bottom of which is some kind of soylent green dystopia, but frankly that's quite farfetched. It seems rather straightforward to me that in a free society, one should be free to determine the time and place of their dying, and that if a doctor feels it is within their professional ethics to make that choice as painless and safe as possible, there's nothing wrong with that.

I find it strange that a state can legislate to allow you to kill yourself but not to allow you to smoke pot, even if both freedoms are restricted to the very very ill. I think laws against suicide are silly, ditto the prohibition of marijuana, but then I suppose I'm a little ahead of the curve. Or behind it maybe. Time will tell.