The 9/11 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon shocked the Western world into a sense of insecurity not seen since the Cold War. This public nervousness provided the political leverage the British Labour government needed to bring ID cards onto the agenda. Fear of terrorism has been used by governments around the world to introduce authoritarian new measures in the name of protecting the citizenry. Here in the UK such moves coincided with the Government’s long tradition of centralising control to Whitehall.

Can an information economy replace our fossil fuel economy?

We’re all alone, floating isolated in bubbles of our technology. We’ve built ourselves cocoons of entertainment which make it easier for us to avoid meaningful relationships with other people and the world at large.

The corporate launch of GM foods and crops involved a ruthless global battle plan in which the public were seen as an enemy to be bypassed or defeated. The plan worked flawlessly for a few years then backfired catastrophically from 1998 onwards. Representatives of the industry took over all the governmental and intergovernmental regulatory bodies - including, in the USA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the post of Secretary of Agriculture and, in the UK, the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes and the Royal Society - to name but a few.

"When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 'The Little Prince'

The United States is a huge country with massively decentralised and complex elections. There are hundreds of elections and referenda held simultaneously using punch card, optical scan, touch screen, postal ballot and push-button voting systems. It's a legal and technical minefield of overlapping system and legal requirements with no clear national voice on how elections should be run.

In the final days of the Trojan wars the Greeks left outside Troy a gift for the Trojans - a giant wooden horse. Once the Trojans had opened the gates and wheeled the gift into their city they discovered, too late, that it was full of Greek soldiers. The lesson from this incident is always to look a gift horse in the mouth - and the gifts offered by some western nations to facilitate Third World development are no exception, whether they be food and seeds or computers and software.

I imagine there can be very few people who don’t know where they were and what they were doing when they first saw the film footage of 9/11. In the 1960s, similarly, it was said that everyone could recall their movements at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. The death of Princess Diana was another legendary happening, but without a doubt 9/11 was the most gruesome of such events – the kind which have mythic proportions even before the print dries on the newspaper headlines.

Does Africa need digital handouts or economic independence? When leaders of the eight wealthiest nations in the world met at Gleneagles in 2005 for the G8 summit to discuss the future of Africa, the question of what kind of development Africa needs, and where computing fits in the mix remained unanswered.

Two key assumptions have dominated recent government security policy in the US and UK. The first is that the threat of terror and international crime means that the government's right to know everything about us must outweigh our individual right to privacy. The second is that the rights of the government and major corporations to secrecy must outweigh our right to know about their activities.