You’ve heard of the FBI’s “Quantico Circuit” and were outraged by illegal warrantless wiretapping by Bushist minions. To no avail, you flooded Congress with emails and phone calls, angered by the bipartisan “FISA Amendments Act of 2008″ and the swell party thrown by AT&T for “Blue Dog” Democrats in Denver this week for the convention. But just in time for a new administration (and the bundles of cash always at the ready for the expanding homeland security market), comes a complete “surveillance in a box” system called the Intelligence Platform!

In September 2001, when the student Salman Jarbar established the first Iranian weblog, no one imagined that blogging would become a social phenomenon in Iran. But over the past seven years blogs have come to fulfil the role of liberal newspapers, civil society organisations and even private gatherings. In 2004 unofficial estimates placed Persian as the fourth most common language in the blogosphere. The state's backlash against the virtual community started in 2003. Sites and blogs that clashed with official state policies were blocked, but censorship then expanded to cover blogs with the term "woman" or "gender" in the title.

Internet assaults are playing a larger role in military strategy and political struggles. Even before Russia invaded Georgia last month, Citizen Lab's researchers noticed sporadic attacks aimed at several Georgian Web sites. Such attacks are especially threatening to countries increasingly linking critical activities to the Internet.

With the Olympic spotlight on China fading, speculation is increasing about whether controls on foreign journalists, relaxed in the lead-up to the Games, will be allowed to expire next month.