Can we nail spam while we're there.
Police want new powers that would include the ability to 'suppress inappropriate internet usage'. Under the circusmstances you feel it's kind of fair enough to target sites that are (a) inciting violence and/or (b) teaching people how to blow things up. The security services seem to have clocked what the rest of us have known for a long time - that there are some properly crazy people on the net.
Such an excellent means for the anonymous diffusion of ideas and information, is bound to include obscure nooks that are colonised by terrorists. To shut down a site that is propagating extremist ideas should be relatively simple. Sadly, it is as simple as starting up a new terrorist site the very same day.
The fact that a course of action is fraught with complexity is a rubbish reason not to take action, and the Tora Bora bits of the internet should certainly come in for a bit of intervention, clumsy or otherwise. In fact this will probably be the one area where the net will not convulse in a spasm of libertarian outrage.
Meawnhile, there is a great storm a-brewin' over global governance of the internet generally. Expect that argument to get hijacked influenced by the counter-terror debate.
But if governments and security services are going to start throwing money at internet security, the Observer blog has one little request. Could they please make sure that the victims of collateral damage in the forthcoming net crackdown are not ordinary punters who should retain their right to communicate online with a degree of privacy, but the spammers.
Let's face it, lawmakres are excellent at using anti-terror bills as a way of introducing authoritarian measures that they quite fancied introducing anyway. They are also good at writing bills that have all sorts of unintended consequences. So here is a great opportunity to win the hearts and minds of the blogosphere while making the world a safer place and looking like you are taking radical action: pass an anti-terror (internet) bill that puts spammers out of business.
If such a thing is possible. (Meawnhile, as anti-spam measures go, we can be fairly sure this won't work. But it might be kind of satisfying for a while.)
