William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that, in the era of the Internet, the Lehman vision would be “the equivalent of requiring everyone who listens to music to buy 78 rpm shellac records. What will the children dial in to read? The collected speeches of Vice President Al Gore? And believe it or not, there’s also talk of the Postal Service getting involved in local public libraries through information kiosks.”[6.10] In effect the White House approach would jack up the price of independent, privately originated information, while making it easier to obtain Washington-blessed information. The information kiosks led some librarians to think of noses and camel’s tents. For the Postal Service at one point said it would let local librarians and citizens use the kiosks to retrieve only designated categories of information, as opposed to, say, everything on the World Wide Web. On a 1 to 10 scale of Big Brotherism, the kiosk idea as originally proposed was an 8.5 or worse.[6.11] If the postal bureaucrats weren’t trying to be Big Brother in the strictest sense—and no, they weren’t—then they at least were unwittingly paving the way for him. Worse, the Postal Service has talked of issuing tens of millions of “U.S. Cards” that would “mediate all government services and controls over citizens,” while at the same time an Internal Revenue Service official has proposed a system that would file our tax returns for us.[6.12] I hate both ideas. Rather than compiling Orwellian dossiers on citizens, governments should help us computerize via TeleRead-style programs so we can more easily do the “paperwork” ourselves by way of electronic forms. Investigators could audit the forms, but only under appropriate circumstances. How much better this would be—not just e-books, but electronic empowerment against bureaucracy—than the vision that Washington and other governments have in mind for us. Perhaps the Lehman idea and the Postal and IRS plans will have been beaten back or rendered harmless by now. Whatever happens, though, it is clear that new technology may harm both privacy and democracy if our vigilance lapses. The threat of electronic oligarchy, stanching the free flow of facts that intelligent nonmillionaires demand, is hardly unique to the States. In the United Kingdom, for example, The _Times Higher Education Supplement_ has warned against a copyright regime that would be a paradise for read-o-meter companies but a nightmare to people valuing free libraries. Just like Lehman’s proposal in the U.S., the wrong laws in the U.K. could lead to a Copyright Gestapo; let’s hope that neither country will criminalize one of the prerequisites for democracy: curiosity.