Nick’s Reviews > Permanent Record > Status Update

If you're reading this now - this sentence - on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around...no matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

An interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone's address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go though the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions...whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything.

Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don't care about freedom of the press because you dont like to read. Or that you don't care about freedom of religion because you don't believe in God.

The data we generate just by living or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance vas turning the consumer into a product which corporations sold.

by changing the meanings of basic English words, such as "acquire and "obtain. According to the report, it was the government's position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency "searched for and retrieved" them from its database.

There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America. What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be—could be—doing secretly to the world.

As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time...the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people.