Wired on Friday: It's a cynical given in journalism that, if you can find three of anything, you can justifiably call it a trend. This past week saw three organisations kick-start in three countries, including Ireland.

They're dedicated to giving people who care about technical issues a voice in the political decisions being made in their country and beyond. I'm not sure if they spell a trend but they certainly mark an important shift in how the internet and technology policy is being made - and being tackled by citizens.

Digital Rights Ireland - www.digitalrights.ie - was launched on Wednesday at the Pearse Street Library in Dublin. Its chairman is UCD law lecturer TJ McIntyre, and it has a fine array of academics, journalists and technologists behind it. The group is putting out information on how to tackle SMS spam and is working on documents about how libel might affect online writers in the State.

But its key purpose is to try to educate the public, politicians and the press about the opinions and beliefs of a sizeable chunk of net users, who believe that their civil liberties are being affected by attempts to control or moderate modern technology.

The music industry's rounding up of file-sharers; the Government's attempts to enforce data retention on internet service providers, and the use of mobile phone data as effective tracking devices for its citizens are the sort of issues the group is tackling. Similarly, this Monday, the Open Rights Group (which I'm connected to) launched in Britain, and this week a Canadian group, Online Rights Canada, opens its doors. What does their arrival mean?

The past few weeks have seen the scaling up to the international arena of previously domestic American debates on the net. Europe and the US have locked horns on how domain names should be governed.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a previously unconvincing United Nations summit on the internet, clawed some power for itself at a recent meeting in Tunis. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), a slow-moving, uncontroversial international body, now deals with controversial topics.

Cynics have suggested that the principal reason the debate has moved to organisations like WIPO and the EU is not the growing importance of the net, but the ease with which companies and trade groups can lobby for undemocratic changes to basic laws when they fight for them in the more obscure corners of international debate.

The blunt term for this is "policy laundering": introduce a regulation which you might never be able to sell to your own country to an obscure committee in a distant place. Next, use that country or international group's adoption of the proposal to legitimise its importation into your original target. After all, if all the world agrees to a policy, why should one country oppose it?

In the recent past, lobbyists have successfully laundered policies through to worldwide adoption with little debate. The rash of copyright term extensions that the world has mostly accepted since the 1970s were mainly achieved through international agreements.

Sadly, Ireland has been one of those "far off countries" co-opted into these experiments. The Government's adoption of strict data retention policies in early 2005 is regularly cited in Brussels as a reason for other European nations to adopt the same law. There are still advantages to being the leader in policy initiatives and Ireland has benefited from its flexibility as a small, young, and determined nation. But in areas where there's not much debate in the State itself, its flexibility can be used to rush through laws that would cause a furore if initially debated under the powerful scrutiny of, say, Washington's hordes of special interests.

And hence the reason for these small digital rights groups. Ask their founders, and they'll most likely talk to you of how large corporate interests and politicians misuse technology to stamp on freedoms locally.

But there's no point in organising unless you have the power to challenge those injustices. Thanks to policy laundering, Ireland - and Canada, and Britain - may be just where those battles will be first fought. Digital Rights Ireland has used Ireland's longer experiences with data retention to lead the way in fighting the law on the wider European front. The group has placed parliamentary questions and has lobbying tools to let its supporters contact MEPs.

When EU bureaucrats describe their planned regime as uncontroversial, Irish citizens, who fought the proposals, are best placed to expose that lie. Pearse Street seems a long way from the global corridors of power where international laws are made, but it may have a fast-track to being heard there, and stopping the worst from being imposed on us all.