[alexqgb]

Unlike Germans - who had the Statsi to contend with, and before that the SS - Americans have never been exposed to a genuine, law-unto-itself, every-phoneline-tapped, free-to-kidnap-torture-and-kill secret police force.

One of the clearest lessons learned is that once these things take root, they are incredibly hard to dislodge. When they do go, it's only due to truly cataclysmic change. What naive Americans may regard as absurd hyper-sensitivity or a hopeless lack of technical sophistication is often an acute awareness that never letting it happen again means banning a lot of stuff that young innocents casually dismiss "as just being how the internet works".

Evgeny Morozov (author of "The Net Delusion" http://amzn.to/nOOxzQ) observes that casual openness is exactly how the web can be used to work against you. He makes the point that while folks safely ensconced in California should be grateful for their freedom from truly abusive government, they should also be a lot more sensitive to the concerns - and outright trauma - still found in places that haven't been so lucky.

Of course, I'm over-simplifying his argument a bit. If you want a more complete (and much more entertaining) introduction, RSA did an especially good animation of a talk he gave, which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU

[hollerith]

You mean Gestapo, not SS.

[alexqgb]

Correct - thank you.