Bird’s-Eye: We lead with a photo that is the quintessence of irony about increased gov’t surveillance. Cory Doctorow (author of Little Brother) takes on the new UK Digital Economy Act in a scathing Guardian op-ed. And Iceland becomes the home of the free, for Wikileaks type peoples.

* Irony

* Digital Economy Act: This means war Cory Doctorow Guardian

I’m not such a techno-triumphalist that I believe that the free and open internet will solve all our socio-economic problems. But I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

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Iceland is proposing radical new laws that will create a safe haven for investigative journalism and therefore the release of this kind of shocking footage, which exposes a cover-up, as well as the true nature of a war where a superpower deploys its weapons on a third world country, in this instance cutting down, among others, two people working for Reuters. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (Immi) will allow organisations like Wikileaks to provide the strongest possible protections for sources and whistleblowers releasing sensitive material that big business and secretive states want to suppress.