Can Twitter Cause Revolutions

What can I say. Again I read today's New York Times with my morning coffee and came across two interesting articles. The first one concerned a request by a staff member of the White House asking the company Twitter to delay a global maintenance of their service which would have shut the service down for a period of time so that the White House could continue to receive up to date news on the civil unrest in Iran. Dissidents in Iran have been Twitterring away (Is that such a word) by the second about the disputed election and it's repurcussions. Recently, We have seen this before where massive protests were organized through the use of some social networking site. In this new world, a large number of people can be mobilized in a very short period of time. Are these sites the new tools of Democracy. The United States Government may look at this with glee when it comes to other countries, especially ones considered hostile to our own interests but I wonder if the government would feel the same way if massive protests were being organized in this country using the same tools. This leads me to the next article. The increased scrutiny by the National Security Agency over people's e-mails and phone calls. Big Brother is watching. Technology has done wonderful things. We can now get more information faster over the Internet. We can communicate with people continents away with a touch of a button. We can organize people with similar interests. But have we lost something in return. We have to be extremely careful what we we say or pictures we post in our e-mails, blogs,websites etc. You never know who could we looking at it and for what reason. Someone might consider me a subversive after reading this blog. All of this just seems so Orwellian (Is that a word) to me.