With the threat of today's protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America.

Some of today's biggest legal debates (genetic discrimination, patents for human genes) might have seemed far-fetched not so long ago. So the American Civil Liberties Union is looking to science fiction to figure out tomorrow's biggest challenges to personal liberty.

Peter Watts, the critically-acclaimed Canadian author of Blindsight and other dystopian novels, entered a dystopia of his own on Tuesday after border guards beat and pepper sprayed him at the US-Canadian border. Now you can help with his legal defense.

Join scifi greats Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker, with io9 editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, in San Francisco Monday night at a benefit for high tech civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Yeah, I'm a civil liberties futurist junkie. That's right - I want to make the future a place where you've got a right to do things like speak your mind online, or get a little privacy away from government's prying eyes. I also think scientists and engineers should have the freedom to tinker with machines, whether…