Lawrence Lessig’s blog is probably one of, if not the, most informative blogs on the net. His content is always insightful, brief, and articulate and he manages to get super intriguing guest bloggers. So you’d think I’d read it more often, but I’ve realized I need some sort of connection with the blog I’m reading or it just doesn’t keep me coming back every day.

Anyway, Elizabeth’s post convinced me to read guest blogger, Geof Stone’s series on civil liberties during times of war. It was more than a high school U.S. history class refresher; I learned a lot of stuff that I never knew before.

The United States has a long and consistent pattern of unduly restricting civil liberties in time of war. Time after time, we have panicked in the face of war fever. We have lashed out at those we fear and allowed ourselves to be manipulated by opportunistic and exploitative politicians. We did this in 1798, when we enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, during the Civil War when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, during World War I when the nation brutally suppressed all criticism of the war and the draft, during World War II when we interned 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, during the Cold War when we humiliated, abused and silenced tens of thousands of individuals for their political beliefs and associations, and during the Vietnam War when the government engaged in an aggressive program of surveillance, infiltration, and surreptitious harassment designed to “exposre, disrupt, and neutralize” antiwar dissent.

Then he goes into more detail with each one of those examples. A must read.

This morning I was reading the NY Times and came across yet another article about supression of civil rights in Zimbabwe. (“supression of civil rights in Zimbabwe” is like “violence in the Middle East”) A couple passages really stood out:

In November alone, Zimbabwe’s Parliament enacted legislation mandating a two-year prison term for practicing journalism without a license. A second law made it illegal to conduct voter education without government approval, requiring most election workers to register and clear electioneering materials with the state.

Just imagine – “practicing journalism without a license” – we’d all be in jail.

Earlier this year, the government installed equipment on Zimbabwe’s Internet service providers to monitor and censor e-mail messages. In July, it tried to bar the one cellphone company outside state control from routing calls outside the country, saying unsupervised foreign telephone calls were a national security threat.

Once again, those magic words – “security threat.” And it occurred to me that Zimbabwe desperately needs bloggers. At the Berkman Internet and Society conference we looked at South Korea and Iran as case studies of where blogging has really made an impact in reforming journalism and politics. The main conclusion was that blogging and citizen journalism took off in those two countries because the major media is so conservative and state controlled. On the other hand, something like San Diego Blog isn’t nearly as popular because it doesn’t offer its readers much that they can’t find in our local paper or independent weeklies. As much as we complain about our media, we just don’t have that same level of repression.

But if blogging were to get rolling in Zimbabwe, North Korea, or Cuba, I think you would really see an immediate civic revolution. A quick look on google and Blog Africa shows that Zimbabwe really needs some help in developing an online space for people to express themselves and discuss issues. The main opposition party’s website is asking for online volunteers. Cathy Buckle’s weblog seems like one of the few (the only?) actually written from inside Zimbabwe. inZIM.com is also asking for administrative and content help. This could be a perfect project for BloggerCorps.