It's nostalgia time, so please indulge me as I revisit some (mostly) old news. (It may be paranoia on my part, but I think it is very easy for us as Americans -- and I include myself -- to forget the value of our freedom, and the nature of those who would jump at the opportunity to take it away.)

As anyone who read 1984 will remember, Big Brother ruled not so much by governmental decrees and law enforcement, but by interactive media, i.e., rule by "The Telescreen."

I have long believed that when Big Media finally merges with Big Government, the real time of Big Brother will have arrived. The United States still has stubbornly resilient written document called the Constitution, however, so horrors like this will take a bit more time to implement.

It is ironic that the people we entrust to be the watchdogs against totalitarian evil would become its progenitors, even enforcers, but such is the nature of power. (Lord Acton was right of course.) Great Britain is ahead of us, for there is no First Amendment hurdle to be overcome by Patriot Acts or compliant courts. The result?

[T]he job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that "much loved" institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have "trained journalists" doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I'd rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I'd trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech [footnote].

When it comes to judging others - judging us here, for instance - the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.

But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC's choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC "expert" on Islam for an upcoming forum.

The Iron Curtain (and its physical manifestation, Berlin Wall) once separated freedom from Totalitarianism. In a world without borders, where freedom is constantly encroached, where does freedom find safe places?

How about the blogosphere? A new word for partakers in computer-assisted free speech, this is one of the few checks and balances which, thanks to the First Amendment, appeared almost out of nowhere and now stands squarely in the way of these abuses. Recall this recent language (conveniently not available for downloading!) from The London Times:

A proliferating band of independent writers known as "bloggers" (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.

There is of course already a legislative movement afoot to restrict blogging in Europe. Here in the U.S., the first volley in the Cold War against bloggers has already been fired. Bill O'Reilly was the right man at the right time for this perfidious piece of work -- his carefully cultivated, grass-rootish pose as leader of opposition to Big Liberal Media providing him with the perfect cover. Dan Rather or Peter Jennings could never have gotten away with comments like these (via James Lileks):

....[T]hey work for no one. They put stuff up with no restraints. This, of course, is dangerous, but it symbolizes what the Internet is becoming.

So all over the country, we have people posting the most vile stuff imaginable, hiding behind high tech capabilities.

Sometimes the violators are punished, but most are not. We have now have teenagers ruining the reputations of their peers in schools on the Internet.

Ideologues accusing public officials of the worst things imaginable.

And creeps gossiping about celebrities in the crudest of ways.

The Internet has become a sewer of slander and libel, an unpatrolled polluted waterway, where just about anything goes.

"All hail America's fair and balanced Blog Czar! We who are about to blog salute you!"

UPDATE: There is already a movement in Congress to regulate content of talk radio shows by forcing them to provide "fair comment." Talk radio (the first generation of interactive media) is a predecessor of blogging, and if this insidious form of censorship (disguised as "fairness") can be imposed, is blogging next?