Have been running around, including appearing on a live BBC World Service programme World, Have Your Say on Wednesday which spent the best part of an hour looking at different issues of secrecy/privacy and the limits or not thereof.

Here is the programme if you are interested – listen soon or it will vanish. For me it was a special pleasure to join in debate with famed US blogger Jeff Jarvis.

As usual in such programmes – more like a free-wheeling conversation than a structured analysis of the issues – it was hard to keep a focus on the heart of the issue. In this case, regardless of where you draw the line on ‘openness’ for public and private sector information, how do you then hold that line as a matter of law and practice?

The other point I made, largely lost in the ebb and flow, was a bigger one.

Namely if Western governments lurch or are lurched towards some radical form of openness/transparency, will that put us at a real-time operational disadvantage vis-a-vis regimes who do not believe in freedom at all?

Could the longer-term result be a huge set-back for freedom? Does civilisation itself depend upon some consensus about intelligent privacy arrangements applying to governments as to citizens, just to get things done in a reasonable way?

No such consensus, no civilisation?