The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

The sort of sweeping parochial espionage and attempts to extract information from all sorts of institutions are well documented, but I think in this context there's a danger of oversimplifying and seeing that sector of cyber as a one-way street.

If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.