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it would also be a mistake not to take seriously the role of new communications media in understanding civic life. In democratic states, citizens need information about what challenges a government faces and what it’s proposing to do about it to be effective citizens. And citizens need to be able to connect with one another to discuss, debate and propose solutions. What a communications medium makes possible has a shaping influence on civic life.

When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish. The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

the federal government is not attached to Moore's Law

Here's an area for both some disruption and some lobbying. Let's build tools that allow members of Congress to aggregate messages being sent to them, and to associate those messages with congressional districts. Let's come up with a way for a member to see what their constituency is saying about any particular issue they'd like, and let's provide that as an open service so that anybody can see what a particular constituency is saying. That way, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

Right now, your voice online -- in the mediums you participate in, not only don't matter: legally they can't matter. Online identities don't count when it comes to the official record

The jury system may not survive if it is undermined by social networking sites

"We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged."

Not only does the mass media have extensive authority in political campaigns, but they can even exercise power over government officials and affairs. The media and the president both need each other; "The media need news to report, and the president may need coverage." Therefore, both the president and the media work hard to utilize one another. Public problems that receive the most media coverage are considered to be the most important ones by the public, giving the media an important role in the public agenda. The media provides the government with a better understanding of the need and desires of the society.

From an unseen distance, Chipchase used his phone to pilot me through the unfamiliar chaos, allowing us to have what he calls a “just in time” moment. “Just in time” is a manufacturing concept that was popularized by the Japanese carmaker Toyota when, beginning in the late 1930s, it radically revamped its production system, virtually eliminating warehouses stocked with big loads of car parts and instead encouraging its assembly plants to order parts directly from the factory only as they were needed. The process became less centralized, more incremental. Car parts were manufactured swiftly and in small batches, which helped to cut waste, improve efficiency and more easily correct manufacturing defects. As Toyota became, in essence, lighter on its feet, the company’s productivity rose, and so did its profits. There are a growing number of economists who maintain that cellphones can restructure developing countries in a similar way. Cellphones, after all, have an economizing effect. My “just in time” meeting with Chipchase required little in the way of advance planning and was more efficient than the oft-imperfect practice of designating a specific time and a place to rendezvous. He didn’t have to leave his work until he knew I was in the vicinity. Knowing that he wasn’t waiting for me, I didn’t fret about the extra 15 minutes my taxi driver sat blaring his horn in Accra’s unpredictable traffic. And now, on foot, if I moved in the wrong direction, it could be quickly corrected. Using mobile phones, we were able to coordinate incrementally. “Do you see the footbridge?” Chipchase was saying over the phone. “No? O.K., do you see the giant green sign that says ‘Believe in God’? Yes? I’m down to the left of that.”

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point.