AP Photo

Among all the excited commentary about the role of social networking in the Arab spring, one uncomfortable fact stands out: internet censorship and surveillance are alive and well in Tunisia and Egypt. They're being orchestrated and supervised by (mostly) different people, of course, but the intermediaries implementing it are the same as before: western technology companies that are apparently prepared to sell filtering and surveillance kit to anyone with a government purchase order. And the result is the same as before: a webpage saying "Sorry: the page you requested does not exist". Except that some regimes exclude the apology.