Embrace the Internet - that's what I told Riz Khan on his Al-Jazeera show early this month on how the government should respond to 'pesky bloggers'.

Eventually, that's what the government will do but given their track record, they'll have to be dragged to it kicking and screaming.

The Internet has somewhat helped to level the playing field between them and us. The powers-that-be will have to work the ball just like everyone else - no more penalty kicks.

The government has, in recent months, lost its monopoly on setting the news agenda. To its chagrin, what is ignored by the docile mainstream media often finds its way into cyberspace.

Take for example the troubled RM4.6 billion Port Klang Free Zone debacle which has resulted in one of the biggest bailouts in the nation's history. Not to mention the many corruption scandals involving top leaders.

State secrets

Not surprisingly, the government has taken pains to curb such online disclosures. Their first target - blogger Nathaniel Tan.

He was locked up for four days - all for nothing. Indeed, if the cops really wanted to find out the source of the 'freedom for sale' allegation against their political boss Deputy Internal Security Minister Johari Baharum, Tan's blog was certainly not the place to start.

Their first stop should have been two newspapers - the MCA-owned The Star and the Umno-owned Utusan Malaysia .

Why?

In early March, both dailies broke the news - on the same day - that an unnamed senior politician (read: Johari) was being investigated for allegedly receiving RM5 million for freeing several underworld figures detained without trial under the Emergency Ordinance.

The dailies would normally not have had the gumption to run such a report - based solely on allegations made on an anonymous website - let alone publish it on their front pages.

It's clear that the editors received the nod from someone higher-up. And if you put two and two together, the green light most probably came from the police's top brass.

Stunning allegations

Following both reports, police chief Musa Hassan went out of his way to vow that police would get to the bottom of the matter regarding the website's claims - not exactly standard operating procedure for the force when dealing with such wild allegations.

The source of the stunning allegations actually came from two sites but both with a single page of identical contents - US-based freeweb.com which provides free hosting services.

Nobody would have known the existence of such obscure sites in the World Wide Web had these two major newspapers not reported the matter.

So, back to the police. Why go after Tan instead of The Star and Utusan Malaysia ?

And while we are asking questions, here's one more: Given that the probe is under the Official Secrets Act, does that mean that there's some truth to the allegations despite the Attorney-General's 'He's clean' stamp for Johari?

Otherwise, how could Tan be revealing state secrets when they are obviously not true?

Bad blood

What is not a state secret, however, is the bad blood between the police chief and the deputy minister.

A few months later, Johari hit back with gusto by lodging an Anti-Corruption Agency report against Musa for taking bribes to free, yes, a number of gangsters.

To add to the farce, the ACA which investigated both cases - Johari's and Musa's - was until recently headed by a man who himself was probed for corruption. Thank goodness, the ACA chief did the government a favour - he took his pension and quietly faded away.

Then there followed the shocking revelation by Musa that he had been fixed-up by some of his own colleagues.

Faced with such backbiting and schisms among its ranks, the government has moved swiftly to pull the plug on the online chatter on these scandals.

Obviously, by arresting the likes of Tan, the government hopes to spook blogosphere. 'Punish one monkey to scare away all others,' as Umno Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaluddin put it metaphorically.

And he's confident of victory - after all, in cyberspace, no one can hear you scream.

If netizens think they can actually fight a war of resistance sitting in front of their computer screens, they are dead wrong.

If we are going to win this fight, we need to crawl out from our little cubby holes, draw a line in the sand and engage the enemy in the real world.

Otherwise, we may as well go and pick bananas.