See more of the story

This week in Iran, the technology with the trifling name of Twitter has been deployed in the dead-serious role of helping to organize protests against an election many consider fraudulent. Social networking has been so valuable to the exchange of information in Iran that the U.S. government asked Twitter to delay an upgrade that might have interrupted service. Yet, while the government in Tehran has been unable to shut down the Internet, it is up to the task of trying, and ultimately, as New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman points out, guns trump cell phones.

Last week in China, where Internet content is regularly stifled, the government was defending new regulations that require personal computers to be sold with censorship software included, ostensibly to block pornography. Critics suspect more-sinister motives. But in such a lucrative market, manufacturers are unlikely to resist, and in any case the software is not so far removed from the firewalls and keystroke-logging programs used around the world, including in the United States.

Indeed, the United States, where Internet traffic is not blocked but is certainly surveilled -- where this week it was revealed that the National Security Agency's digital dragnet has encompassed many more personal phone calls and e-mails than was previously acknowledged, an unsavory circumstance stemming from the appealing goal of finding out what terrorists are up to.

This messy technological stew -- complex and confusing, at once liberating and threatening -- is what George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" feels like in the real world.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." That's the operative political strategy in Orwell's book, and earlier this month, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China followed the script. Websites were blocked and the square was locked down with a show of military strength and even umbrellas (to thwart the television cameras). It's unlikely that many Chinese were fooled. But it was as unlikely, given the risks to their personal safety and to their country's relative economic stability, that they would resist.

What's the harm, Americans may think, if the government accidentally reads my e-mail? I didn't do anything wrong. The surveillance program is directed at those people, the ones who oppose our way of life. And yet, knowing that data bytes are the DNA evidence of history, will those same Americans begin to think twice before expressing an impolitic ideal? Even with faith in the government's intent -- and a belief that mistakes would be quickly sorted out -- would they set themselves up for the trouble?

Congress may look more deeply into the NSA's surveillance efforts, which are said to have continued even after the change in administrations. But ultimately, freedom comes down to what people are willing to sacrifice for it. We Americans have it easy. We believe in freedom, and we possess it. The issue is whether we take the high road or the low road to preserve it.

In Iran, much more is at stake. Those standing up to authority may have the will and the technology. But sometime soon they'll have hard decisions to make.