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The digital era adds a new complexity to the human test of dealing with death.

Loved ones once may have memorialized the departed with private rituals and a notice in the newspaper. Today, as family and friends gather publicly to write and share photos online, the obituary may never be complete. But families can lose control of a process they feel is their right and obligation when the memories are stored online—encrypted, locked behind passwords, just beyond reach. One major cause is privacy law. Current laws, intended to protect the living, fail to address a separate question: Who should see or supervise our online legacy?

The backlash to al-Jazeera has begun: Accuracy in Media, the conservative watchdog group, has labeled the network a "Homeland Security threat" and is calling for a congressional probe into the "controversial operations of foreign propaganda channel" following its acquisition of Current TV. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League has announced it has ongoing concerns about the Qatari-owned network, due to “a troubling record” of giving "virulent anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic extremists access to its airwaves."

Time Warner Cable minced no words when it announced that it was dropping Current TV, just hours after Al Jazeera acquired the channel. “Our agreement with Current has been terminated and we will no longer be carrying the service,” the distributor said. “We are removing the service as quickly as possible.”

Critics of the distributor’s decision didn’t hold back, either, calling it cowardly, shameful and just plain dumb. On Twitter and Facebook, many people assumed that Time Warner Cable was expressing corporate opposition to Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news giant, by taking Current off its cable systems in the United States. But executives at the cable company said the channel wasn’t removed for political reasons. It had more to do, they said, with Current’s low ratings and its contract, which had a “change of ownership” clause that allowed it to be terminated. Time Warner Cable, which has 12 million subscribers, enough to make it the second-largest cable company in the country, has taken a hard line against low-rated channels. That said, Time Warner Cable doesn’t want to be seen as outwardly hostile to Al Jazeera, especially at a time when other major distributors are keeping Current on their cable systems.

In the few minutes it will take you to read this story, some 3 million new tweets will have flitted across the publishing platform Twitter and ricocheted across the Internet. The Library of Congress is busy archiving the sprawling and frenetic Twitter canon — with some key exceptions — dating back to the site’s 2006 launch. That means saving for posterity more than 170 billion tweets and counting, with an average of more than 400 million new tweets sent each day, according to Twitter. But in the two years since the library announced this unprecedented acquisition project, few details have emerged about how its unwieldy corpus of 140-character bursts will be made available to the public. That’s because the library hasn’t figured it out yet. “People expect fully indexed — if not online searchable — databases, and that’s very difficult to apply to massive digital databases in real time,” said Deputy Librarian of Congress Robert Dizard Jr. “The technology for archival access has to catch up with the technology that has allowed for content creation and distribution on a massive scale. Twitter is focused on creating and distributing content; that’s the model. Our focus is on collecting that data, archiving it, stabilizing it and providing access; a very different model.”