I think Behr has got it about right, and from the smell on the wind last week:

A Home Office spokesperson said the government was examining the report and would respond shortly.

“We are firm believers in the internet. It is a huge force for good. But it relies on the confidence of millions of users,” said Lord Broers, chairman of the committee that published the Personal Internet Security report.

“You can’t just rely on individuals to take responsibility for their own security. They will always be out-foxed by the bad guys.”

[…]

But, speaking later on the BBC’s Today programme, he conceded it was hard to contain the problems of the

“Because of the way it’s been set up, without a security level, so that people could talk to each other and have access to everybody else’s data, it’s become almost unrealistic at this stage, because criminals are moving-in in a big way,” he said.

“And they’re not the sad hacker in their back room – this is organised crime.”

…I agree we are soon to suffer (at very least) a silly-season cyber-scaremongering fest (“…an area of Internet the size of Wales is occupied by Al Quaeda…”) – but It’ll probably be worse unless the lumbering corpus of Government can find something more interesting to do instead.

Behr writes:

Watch out – the state is after your hard drive
Rafael Behr
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

The Ministry of Defence last week ordered British soldiers to stop blogging, putting videos on YouTube, joining online chats or sending text messages without a superior officer’s permission. But the soldiers carried on regardless, posting caustic commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a mini digital mutiny.

I’m surprised the MoD has taken so long to deal with the problem of khaki samizdat. Censorship is part of military life. Imagine if Tommies had been able to blog about the trenches in October 1914. There would have been an outcry back home. The war could well have been over by Christmas.Meanwhile, on civvy street, a House of Lords committee last week criticised the government for being too lax on internet-related crime, particularly fraud. The internet, it said, was ‘a Wild West’ and ‘the playground of criminals’.

You can hear, from Westminster, the sound of the state pooing its pants about the digital revolution. Its authority is being eroded on two fronts. First, the internet doesn’t recognise national borders so is nearly impossible to police. That is good for criminals. Second, the technology that allows people to publish and broadcast online is so widespread that central authorities cannot control the agenda. That is good for political activists. The tricky thing for government is how to curtail the freedom of the crooks while respecting the rights of reasonable dissenters.

This is the biggest thing to happen in communications since the printing press. Blogs and YouTube videos are passed around from Basra to Bradford, flooding society in the same way vernacular Bibles and pamphlets exploded into 15th-century Europe. Established authorities were complacent about their monopoly on information. Now, they are like the Catholic hierarchy when people stopped listening to the Latin liturgy and started reading the Gospel and interpreting it for themselves. This is a media Reformation.

The first Reformation, the religious one, was not pretty, producing a bunch of false Messiahs and deranged millennial cults. The media Reformation is the same. You don’t have to go far to find a nutty conspiracy theory. But the Reformation also shaped our idea of the free-thinking individual, ushered in democratic revolutions in Europe and gave birth to the Enlightenment. The Counter-Reformation, meanwhile, produced the Spanish Inquisition.

Today’s Counter-Reformation has started in states that are instinctively hostile to free speech. China already censors the web and jails bloggers. So does Iran.

The British state has so far veered between neglect and encouragement for the internet. The government once thought it was a nifty way to make friends with the electorate. They invited people to send online petitions to Number 10. But the mood is changing. The new MoD guidelines for blogging squaddies are a straw in the wind.

I’m prepared to bet that the next major government online initiative will not be some post-your-comments-here consultation gimmick. It will be a heavyweight Internet Crime and Security Bill. It will ostensibly be aimed at protecting Mrs Miggins and her PC from fraudsters, pornographers and terrorists. But it will also give the state sweeping powers to shut down internet service providers and snoop around your hard drive. It will be counter-reformation.gov.uk.