The Internet and the Syrian conflict

This article (excerpts below) is about US politics, but is relevant to other nations too, as all national rulers seem to be wanting to control access to dissident opinions. What do IN members think of the article?

"Speaking before a group of State Department workers last week, Secretary of State John Kerry gave voice to the frustration authoritarians experience because of the easy access to information on the internet. Secretary Kerry told the audience that the world had been "complicated" by "... the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year."

"This pesky internet, Kerry says, "makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest." This is a great source of aggravation for our political masters, who, for nearly all of the 20th century, were able to limit and control the information available to their subjects. This is why government efforts to control the internet are on the rise and will continue to increase in intensity and frequency; an informed public is just too darned hard to "organize" and to dictate a "common interest" to.

"What Kerry and the rest of the reigning Republicrat authoritarians fail to realize -- or simply reject outright -- is that the only "common interest" of Americans should be freedom. Not health care, global warming, food stamps, Social Security, student loans, or perpetual war. It's hard to maintain control over every facet of citizens' lives when the internet allows exposure of crimes like the NSA's domestic spying or the spread of ideas about human liberty."
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