Bruce Schneier, in August 3rd, 2009 blog post Building in Surveillance, mentions how new technology is being utilized by government for surveillance. While this phenomenon is nothing new, the extent to which modern technology allows quick, easy, inclusive surveillance and censorship is unique to the recent past and present.

There's no doubt that current technology makes it very easy to track people or gain intelligence on them. While everyone always acknowledges that it can help catch real criminals, at which people to people decide a measure is too much of an infringement on citizens' lives?

Of course, the resistance against censorship is always one step ahead. For example, the TOR project is a project that provides and anonymization network that is quite effective. The only problem is that users must remember to use it, and that services or plugins can still log activity and data bout the machine or user. There have also been many ideas for a distributed DNS system (the system that resolves website names into IP addresses to that a site can be accessed) instead of the current localized DNS system that allows for easy governmental control. Blocking DNS requests for particular sites is how the US government has recently been targeting file sharing sites.

I feel with how new computer technology is (and it really is new in comparison to others), we have not yet fully come to terms with it. It will take a lot of time and attempts to find a system that is fair to all parties involved. This is something that we may see much change in throughout our lifetimes.