These are particularly volatile times for people in the communication business. E-mail only added to the misery. In the same week that the people all over the world received a malicious e-mail quickly dubbed the ‘Love Bug’, the White House was trying to explain to the courts why 246,000 missing e-mail messages couldn’t be accounted for, draconian media censorship laws were imposed in Sri Lanka.

Not that censorship is anything to be shocked about. It has always been the knee jerk reaction of governments unable to deal with criticism. In the seventies, censorship took the form of a thick blue pencil in the hands of a competent authority who, on a whim, deleted entire paragraphs of reporters’ copy. Governments like to assume the role of gatekeeper and decide not just of news but what films, books and even cartoons its citizens should have access to. The list is long and ludicrous. In the thirties, John Steinback's 'Grapes of Wrath' was banned for being vulgar, 'Alice in Wonderland' was censored in China because "animals should not use human language", as was Peter Wright's 'Spy Catcher' in Britain, and Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' in many Asian countries. In Sri Lanka, where successive governments never seemed to want to relinquish their grip on the media, the culture of censorship is the single most important reason why state news bulletins are so bland, and public spokespersons so incredulous. Will they never learn from history? Or technology?

Nearly every institution in the country, from the stock market, to universities, to banks to yes, even some government departments, are scrambling to adapt to a global digital economy. So why are we still wielding the blue pencil model? No matter how loud or flawed the voices of dissent may sound, news is what gets shaped by the public --not public officials. Believing that ‘The Media’ is what runs off the presses and gets beamed off towers and antennas, is the equivalent of the record companies believing that CDs and cassettes would remain the only legal way for music and video distribution. Information distribution --and consumption-- is changing by the minute. The MP3 music format and compressed streaming video on the Internet gave record companies and film studios a rude awakening, just like the way the notorious Radio B92 out of Belgrade found a way to ‘broadcast’ minus transmitters. More on this later.

An interesting case to watch is how China balances its communist authority over information with the age of the Internet. In China, the equivalent of a competent authority for cyberspace, is the Internet Information Management Bureau that deals with "infiltration of harmful information on the Internet". It plans to filter anything unsuitable to government policy that includes "false news, copyright violations, and neglect of the legal rights and interests of information providers." If that sounds silly, worse things happen in Myanmar, the former Burma, where someone found owning a modem can be slapped with a 15-year jail term. In that country, e-mail is only available to government officials and some foreigners. But does it work? Can it quell voices of dissent? Not by a long shot. The Internet is opening up newer ways for people to make themselves heard. The downside is that it allows anyone to sound off, and that includes people posting trivia, gossip and pornography. But the upside to all this is that people have choices, and information is no longer a power tool in the hands of the ruling class.

Apart from clandestine radio and anonymous faxes, there are far too many ways for people to express themselves and avoid being traced. One experiment is an online bookstore called www.Booklocker.com that allows authors of sensitive writing to retain their anonymity. E-mail is not always traceable, with many sites (such as www.anonymizer.com) providing filters that make a sender anonymous. On a higher plane there is the Digital Freedom Network (www.dfn.org), a human rights group dedicated marrying Internet technology with social activism. The site features news summaries and alerts from countries still living under repressive governments. On the tame side of censorship it features Indian film-maker Deepa Mehta who was banned when trying to film a 'controversial' movie at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in north India. At the other end of the scale is Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has had limited freedom ever since Myanmar's military government refused to accept her party’s victory in 1991. Yet, censorship has not stopped the flow of information from Suu kyi to the outside world. A videotaped interview with her (found at metalab.unc.edu/freeburma) was smuggled out of Burma as recently as in April this year.

Technology has been the media's big ally. Today a phone call is the equivalent of a satellite uplink ten years ago. Transmitters are no longer large and stationary. Desktop applications have replaced printing presses. So in this climate, the threat of confiscation of property or assets is merely rhetorical. With wireless communication becoming more dependent on international satellites rather than local towers, even the communicator's geography becomes irrelevant. The case of Radio B92 is a lesson for anyone that thinks it has a monopoly on information. In 1996, the Yugoslav government shut down the station but Radio B92 re-routed its transmission on the Web. Milosevic, let them back on the air two days later. In 1999, police sealed its offices again, confiscated the station’s transmitter and took into custody its editor-in-chief. But the BBC rebroadcast the signal, and Radio B92 (also had backed by the United States, Austria, Canada, and a Dutch pirate station, was back in business. The site at www.freeb92.net is today maintained by an international coalition of journalists. Ironically, this small radio station enjoyed far greater reach and support than it would have had if the government left it alone!