If you're reading this you're already sitting in the front line of a war that is being fought across the globe. The latest Tory attempt to gain access to ordinary people's blogs, e-mails and personal information to "protect" the country against terrorism is simply another skirmish in this conflict. What's at stake is access to information - your access to information - because information is power. Control it, shape it and interpret it before it is disseminated widely and you control what people think. Lose control of it and you have no power to shape the thoughts of others. Worse yet, for political elites across the world, uncontrolled information means that people will talk to each other avoiding the "filters" that the elites would like to impose on us. Political power runs vertically, from ordinary people at the bottom upwards to the elites at the top. What kind of world would it be if political power ran horizontally, between ordinary people, and cut the elites out of the equation? Don't know? The elites do and they are afraid of it because that would be true democracy. It would certainly not be the democracy that they would like to impose - the democracy based on the ideas of classical Greece that sought to limit power to those rich enough to "deserve" it - it would be the kind of democracy in which what you and I think is more important than their money. Now think what kind of world that would be.
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