The explosion of information technologies has set in motion a virtual tidal wave of change that is in the process of profoundly affecting organizations and individuals in multiple dimensions.

Information has, until recently, been inseparable from command structures.

The selective dissemination of information has been used as a tool to define and shape the environment to ensure conforming behavior.

Transformation is fraught with both risks and opportunities because it will affect the nature of the information provided as well as the manner in which it is provided.

The full implications and consequences will not be clear for years to come.

We are not in a position to take the apparently safe and comfortable road.

We must design a strategy that identifies and anticipates negative repercussions and enables us to avoid those repercussions or minimize their impacts.

The dynamics of information dissemination have changed considerably in the latter half of this century. What was once a predominantly highly constrained and vertical information flow has evolved into a mix of vertical and horizontal flows.

The sheer volume of information received could frustrate the ability to quickly identify critical information for the decision at hand.

Better education and training are needed to develop the necessary skills to handle these information-rich situations.

Sophisticated presentations can obscure ... [with] a mixture of "fact" and inference.

When information is freely available, superiors tend to micromanage, and subordinates are likely to second guess.

Effective training must instill the judgment required to differentiate between sufficient and necessary or desirable information.

The unintended consequences of adopting information age technologies are 1) virtually ubiquitous, 2) complex enough to require more than one type of remedy, and 3) involve actions among various organizations that need to be closely linked or coordinated in order to be effective.

The underlying problem here isn't operating system security or even the vendor runaround but, rather, people who just read headlines or summaries of security news and then form Opinions based on this information -- or lack thereof. And there's a very good chance that these people are making decisions based on these ill-informed Opinions.

"What are they thinking?"

The plan, in the words of Paul Duguid, information specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, will "blast wide" open the walls around the libraries of world-class institutions.

No one is forecasting a brave new world without actual libraries. Rather, they are raising questions.

Far too many students already read excerpts and seldom read the full texts.

Publishers Weekly: "English-speaking people have distinct words for the concepts of freedom and liberty. But that doesn't mean everyone agrees on what they mean."

In this new volume of cultural history, David Hackett Fischer shows how these varying ideas form an intertwined strand that runs through the core of American life. He examines liberty and freedom not as philosophical or political abstractions, but as folkways and popular beliefs deeply embedded in American culture.

An Act

For centuries, one of the foundations of civilized life has been the concept of privacy. Today, however, a technological revolution threatens to break down the walls that keep our lives private.

Whether we're at home or at work, almost everything we do or say can be seen and heard by strangers -- if they have the right electronic capability.

"American influence" is the great white whale of the 21st century, and Jacques Chirac is the Ahab chasing her with a three-masted schooner. Along for the ride is a crew that includes Hosni Mubarak, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Il, Kofi Annan, the Saudi royal family, Robert Mugabe, the state committee of Communist China and various others who have ordained themselves leaders for life. At night, seated around the rum keg, they talk about how they have to stop American political power, the Marines or Hollywood.

The world is lucky these despots and demagogues are breaking their harpoons on this hopeless quest. Because all around them their own populations are grabbing the one American export no one can stop: raw technology.

Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi.

There is no need to oversell the power of technology. What happened in Ukraine won't happen in Cairo next month. But unless Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin can come up with a way to shut down every engineer and programmer in America who is inventing new ways to output/input ideas and tweaking the ones we already have, they've got a problem.

Their problem -- and the promise here -- is that this stuff is moving the world's people, and fast, toward the one American product that governing elites really need to fear: free speech.

If you are taken in by all the fanfare and hoopla that have attended Google's latest project, you would think Sergey and and Larry are well on their way to godliness.

I do not share that opinion.

The nub of the matter lies in the distinction between information and recorded knowledge.