Where are the good old days (when governments did not understand the internet)?

The topic of governments’ handling and new technologies is making the news all over the world thanks to Egypt, Tunisia, Iran or Algeria. Time has changed since the mid 1990s when the Internet was completely out of reach for governments.

• You can really see the digital divide in action by comparing the political troubles in Ivory Coast (4.6% of population with Internet access), Egypt (21.2 %) and Tunisia (34%). In Ivory Coast, the tension centers around physical threats, embargoes and sanctions. In Egypt and Tunisia, well, you know the story. Governments tried to block access to the network among other measures to control the unrest. Shows how much the Internet has become a strategic question.
• Governments are getting better at the whole technological game. Ten years ago, Internet was a space of total freedom because states were sometimes not even aware it existed. Now it took only three days to the Egyptian government to almost completely shut down the internet (protests started on the 25th of January, access was blocked on the 28th). It is a remarkably short time span for such a massive measure. In more developed countries, cutting the internet is not possible anymore (too many entry points, too many satellites), and the Egyptian government’s will was facilitated by a less developed network. Still, that denotes a big change: states now have a capability to react quickly to what they consider threats in the digital world.
• Laws like Hadopi show that governments can still be both late and in denial when it comes to technologies.
• But in a weird twist of events, the fact that laws are now outdated seem to have created an advantage for some government, like in the US:
  

  the law that protects your right to communicate privately through electronic means was enacted all the way back in 1986, long before email, instant messaging, cell phones and Skype existed.

  Advocates believe the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is being overwhelmed by new technology, creating an advantage for government investigations into terrorism and crime, but threatening the ability of consumers to defend against excessive intrusion.

  Some argue that the 25-year-old ECPA “affords more protection to letters in a file cabinet than email on a server,” according to a recent New York Times story on the subject

  Link

  The story is the following: lack of laws created an advantage for consumers who could do what they wanted (download, hack, spam) on the internet for years. Now that these same technologies are creating huge intelligence opportunity, the balance is shifting and consumers don’t have a fair legal arsenal to defend their rights. How ironic is that? Internet users will soon be demanding more laws to protect themselves from government abuse? What happened to the good old days when users didn’t have to worry about what their government was doing online…