A correspondent wrote:
One of the concessions made by the former president in the address the day before his abrupt departure was to make the Internet freely accessible; you may be aware that the media were heavily censored here under him. He recognized the power of the Internet; he knew the protesters were young and this could be endearing to them;
There is a film of a news conference in which a East German official is announcing in a live press conference a new policy of East Germans crossing the border was to be instituted. The fellow was not fully informed of what the conditions would be, nor when the policy would take effect. An Italian journalist said "when?" The East German officer guessed, "tonight..." Homes on both sides of the wall emptied out as bewildered border guards (the watched the news conference too) were overwhelmed by mass humanity flowing past. That night they partied as they took the wall down, November 1989.
Often enough in history it is a small bureaucratic mistake that brings the whole thing down. In USA where we self report ourselves, where what we read and write is tracked, where google is closely allied with intelligence agencies (Oracle started as a CIA database contractor), there is a serious effort at giving the president an "internet kill switch." We can't have what happened in Tunisia happen here in USA. I hope our leaders someday do something as equally endearing for our youth.
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