There's been a lot of news coverage recently about the Chinese government's efforts to censor the Internet and U.S. companies' collaboration in these efforts. And China isn't the only such country; for example, several Arab countries have long had national Web censorware. Indeed, rulers know that few things undermine repressive governments as much as access to outside media. Western TV famously showed Eastern Europeans that their governments' propaganda was false. A few years earlier, smuggled cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini's speeches helped foment revolution against the Shah of Iran.

And so the Chinese government's massive effort to control public access to the Internet can be rather straightforwardly understood.

In the West, however, it appears that the mechanisms of repression are falling into place almost by accident. There are few cases yet of technology being deployed to actually curb anyone's freedoms, and there is perhaps no single country where the laws are a major threat -- yet. But if you connect the dots on the scariest bits of legislation and public practice in each of several countries, a worrisome picture emerges.

In the U.S., for example, the government asserts that it can data-mine almost whatever it wants looking for patterns. It doesn't matter if an individual police officer can't tap one phone call; what's forbidden case by case is supposedly allowed in the aggregate.

Meanwhile, for security reasons in the U.S. and antipiracy reasons in Europe, there are a variety of rules requiring service providers to keep records of Internet and other telecommunications activity.