Jim Hoagland's newspaper column from April 4, 1996: Governments awakening to threat of the Internet The computer and modem now downsize the globe, enabling citizens to vault over walls of secrecy, law and control erected by governments. Still gathering steam, the information revolution is creating a new generation of ticklish foreign policy and national security problems for the world's governments. They are organized to operate in a heirarchical world of borders and customs posts and to keep out the unwanted, the unhealthy or the dangerous. But the boundaries of cyberspace are unfixed and amorphous. They are being determined more by the availability and cost of communication modems, sophisticated software, satelite stations, encryption techniques and other data processing technology than by government fiat. An example of cyberspace's potential for harm surfaced last week when France asked the United States to crack down on a San Diego-based Islamic group that posts instructions on the Internet for assembling inexpensive bombs like those exploded on the Paris subways last year. French officials traveling or posted abroad fear they are the intended targets of these homemade bombs, the Quai D'Orsay's senior Middle East expert, Denis Bouchard, told American diplomats at a meeting last week on international terrorism in Washington. State Department officials offered the French sympathy. But they did not hold out much hope they coudl act on the sparse information the French provided. The line between computer-driven incitement to terrorism and electronic free speech still has to be drawn in the brave new cyber world. The inchoate nature of that world was underscored by the disclosure March 29 that U.S. authorities had charged an Argentine student with three felonies for illegally entering Pentagon and other U.S. military computers to obtaining confidential files on satellites, radiation and energy-related engineering. But Julio Cesar Ardita, 22, who raided Washington files from his home in Buenos Aires, cannot be extradited under American-Argentine treaties, which do not cover these alleged national security violations. Governments are waking late to the implications of individuals and small groups operating across boundaries and oceans to bypass, introde upon or flip and electronic finger at bureaucracies that have controlled or regulated the security and business of nations for centuries. The implications are particularly dramatic for totalitarian regimes that brook no open dissent. China seeks to impose a government monopoly over economic data transmission into China to go along with the draconian political censorship already practiced on the nation's traditional media. But as long as the Middle Kingdom remains part of the International telephone system with its faxing and modem capabilities, words and facts the communist leadership abhors will spread faster than Big Brother can track them. The world stands roughly where it stood as television began to reshape politics, and policy-making, in ways that we still do not fully understand. A new communication technology arrives to change what we think, as well as how we think and communicate. Traditionalists fear anarchy (or obsolescence). Optimists foresee the best of all worlds, with Orwell's 1984 predictions of Big Brother tracking and brainwashing everyone through television proven to have been 180 degrees off course. But the picture is in fact mixed. Governments have begun to talk seriously to each other about controlling the computer revolution. The Pentagon is studying the information highway as the route to complete domination of the battlefield and thus the ultimate source of power. THe FBI, IRS, and CIA are determined to keep you from being able to encode and transmit information they want to see. Orwell may turn out to have been premature, but not wrong. The struggle over the course of the information revolution is only beginning. The bureaucracies that are most threatened still have powerful hands to play. There is no guarantee that cyberspace will provide the world with the era of new freedoms that now seem likely. That battle is still to be fought, and won. [end of article] Articles such as this are interesting because they appear to be written without any illusion that the interests of governments are anything other than just that, interests of governments. They are NOT the interests of the average citizen.