connected The Economist http://www.economist.co chnology to foster free speech and innovation, and the threats that governments and ompanies pose to i The new green Debate and dissent over the issues raised by the spread of information technology are not new. In the 1990s civilliberties groups, including the pioneering Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF campaigned against the Communications Decency Act, part of which was eventually overturned by America's Supreme Court. Today every corner of the digital universe has its own interest group: consumer groups defend online privacy; hackers reject far-reaching software patents, researchers push for open access to scientific journals online; defenders of transparency call on governments to open their data vaults or take the opening into their own hands As Mr Boyle's analogy suggests, there was a similar diversity in early 1960s environmentalism. Some sought to clean the Hudson river, some to stop logging in Tasmania, some to ban nuclear tests. But as the late American environmentalist Barry Commoner put it: The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else." As it was with the environment, so it became with environmentalism. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s disparate concerns were tied together into a single, if far from seamless, movement that went on to wield real power. The intemet is nothing if not an exercise in interconnection. Its politics thus seems to call out for a similar convergence, and connections between the disparate interest groups that make up the net movement are indeed getting stronger. Beyond specific links, they also More late share what Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, calls the"culture of the internet", a contemporary equivalent of the 1960s counter-culture(in which much of the environmental movement grew up). Its members believe in technological progress, the Most c free flow of information, virtual communities and entrepreneurialism. They meet at"unconferences(where delegates make up their own agenda) and"hackerspaces(originally opportunities to tinker with electronics); their online forum of choice will typically be something such as a wiki that all can contribute to and help to shape In some countries the nascent net movement has spawned"pirate parties" that focus on net-policy issues; the first, in Sweden, was descended from the Pirate Bay, a site created 2 Kerr to aid file sharing after Napster, a successful music-sharing scofflaw, was shut down Pirate Party International, an umbrella group, already counts 28 national organisations as 3 The ever members. Most are small, but Germany's Piratenpartei, founded in 2006, has captured 4 Con seats in four regional parliaments, Islan