I was talking to one of the engineers at Vquence early last week. He has a PhD in data mining. He told me how concerned he is about the amount of available information 'out there'. As a result he declines to blog or to comment on anything on line. He is very careful to ensure that anything he does is absolutely untracable to him.

His view is that anything that anyone says on line remains in place forever and that anyone who puts the information out there is likely to be held accountable at some stage.

I said to him that I totally understand the concept. The problem is that if we all acted that way we would all become totally compliant to what we think authority wants us to do. Isn't that what East Germany was about?

In spite of the knowledge that there may be forces in governments or corporations or elsewhere that want to control the way we think, speak, act - it is entirely counterproductive to do what we think that they want us to do. We need to work toward the greater good. We can not afford to be paranoid about what "they" may think about what "we" say....

It certainly means that what we do should be able to withstand the "front page of the Telegraph" test. But it doesn't mean that we should resile from saying what we think.