Investment by any foreign company in any element of the U.K.'s Critical National Infrastructure should receive careful scrutiny.

As has been the case throughout the history of terrorism, government anxiety centres on what to do about those against whom there may be intelligence but no usable evidence.

Intelligence is fragmentary and hard to discover, so it is by joining forces and sharing information with our allies that we maximise our ability to protect ourselves.

Since 1955, the U.K. has been part of an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Intelligence-sharing is, in itself, commonplace.

My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.

We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it - politics - was important... that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.