Cannataci read Cerf's full quote: "Privacy may actually be an anomaly. [...]"
"I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."
What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has destruction of privacy as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them).
Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)
Quoted ad nauseam on HN but always fitting: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France, the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious. There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?
Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Most people don't have time to think about lofty goals like "privacy" when they need all the focus they can get to care about more basic needs like "shelter" and "putting food on the table".
A very valid point and an equally troubling problem with modern society. Worrying about things like shelter and putting food on the table should be a non-issue in the 21st century, instead it is a modern epidemic and must be fixed. Having said this non-corporeal but none-the-less essential concepts like privacy, liberty and an expectation of trust in leadership should also be a given, sadly they suffered the same fate.
People have to worry a lot less about putting food on the table in the 21st century than at any other time in world history. Calorie counts have been going up a lot, for decades, across every country that formerly used to suffer deficits. Major famines are practically non-existent today, and were not uncommon in prior centuries.
See: calorie count increases across Africa, Asia, South America.
Poverty and global inequality also have been dropping gradually for decades.
Instead of being modern epidemics, these things are former, ancient epidemics that are being eradicated rapidly.
Just because famine no longer exists doesn't mean people aren't having to worry about putting food on the table. In the UK over a million people had to visit emergency food banks last year[1], compared to only 125,000 in 2012. Hospitals are seeing such levels of malnourishment that they have started discreetly giving away food parcels to patients[2]. It's estimated that up to 40% of patients admitted to UK hospitals are malnourished and the number of people admitted to hospital specifically because of malnutrition has risen dramatically in the last year.
If you are wanting to suggest that this is due political decisions rather than a famine or overall lack of food then yes that is true, but it doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people in the UK struggling to feed themselves and their children.
What's happening in Asia or Africa isn't particularly relevant to the level of political engagement in the UK, which is what this discussion is about. That fact that things are getting worse in the UK while improving in much poorer countries just makes the situation even less excusable.
And now it becomes obvious why, in the UK, that the Tory government is deliberately trying to shred the social fabric with excessive cuts etc - all justified by their illogical ideology of 'austerity'. The fact is, the tax credits cuts are going to take 4 billion pounds out of the economy - people who get those tax credits spend them, they don't squirrel them away in their pension plans or buy more buy-to-lets properties like the well off... I am actually thinking of moving back to the US, it is getting so incredibly insane here.
But if you are trying to prevent a revolution - setting up the infrastructure for monitoring the populace while creating the conditions that would precipitate a revolution makes good sense.
There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?
Don't posit it as a privacy vs law-enforcement thing. At its heart it's game-theory.
Let me get a bit abstract first so we can tighten up the lingo. If we start with Cogito ergo sum - the concept that all we know as an individual is that we think and everything else is up for debate, we can also posit that when it comes to intentions we can only know our own. Some people don't even know what they want...I digress. Back to game theory.
You as an individual have no idea what someone else's intentions are. You can trust them, but you can't be sure exactly what they want or what they will do.
Do you provide all electronic communications; spoken, typed, captured by an imaging sensor, read, downloaded, listened to, purchased etc to a body that has the greatest capacity to control you? If yes...
Do you trust all politicians, bureaucrats, and law-enforcement officers? The answer is probably no but we've gotten nowhere because the majority of people have cognitive dissonance when it comes concepts involving technology and privacy intermingling.
So can we posit it like a game of cards? If you had the choice to show 2 cards from your hand, 1 card or 0 cards, which would you choose - knowing that the other player has put down none?
I'm sure there's a better analogy but I thought I'd put the game-theory idea out there so others can take a stab at creating an effective metaphor.
The depiction of humans in the movie WALL-E was one of the scariest and most poignant bits of storytelling I have ever seen, and seems to become more true as apathy grows.
In the face of a breathless and narrative-toeing media, you can only win by using the same tools as they use.
You can't fight fire with fire - the more loudly you decry these policies the more rapidly you alienate moderates and hard-liners alike. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Rather, I think change has to come from one (or both) of two places.
Firstly, inarguable grass roots initiatives, such as crowd-sourced direct democracy, which alter the fundamental structure (I.e. That nation states and representative governance are the only way to go) upon which arguments rest.
The other is to give your opponents enough rope with which to hang themselves - to which end the snooper charter may eventually play. If this government put forth a statement decrying the UN, moderates may scratch their heads and wonder. Hard-liners will join in, as they have against human rights, but moderates will be turned off.
Either way, this war (for it is war) must be fought in the battlefield of minds, and with subtlety. The most powerful idea is the one that you think is your own.
It's impossible as long as there are real actors that are a threat to it - i.e. as long as there is more than one government in the universe and all want access to the same resources.
I stupidly misread you as saying "all-public". Let's call it a brain-fart.
I'm all for government transparency, but I also accept that as long as nations compete with each others, there are areas in diplomacy, trade, espionage and military that need to stay secret.
Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward.
That's a fantastic metaphor for the situation. That could be quite an effective advertising campaign against government surveillance because it visually shows the disparity of exposure while capturing the impropriety of the act.
Meanwhile the clothed guy is sniggering to himself and quietly muttering just loud enough to hear (that one small penis, bends to the right.... her over there, slightly saggy boobs, cellulite).
Hmm. Are you sure? How about tobacco, unbalanced food, guns, ... all these things are advertised and are causing deaths - so their hands are not clean either.
But yes, not their own customers, but the bad analogy holds only when you think that citizens are customers of the government.
Tobacco and junk food are primarily harmful to people who voluntarily consume them, while guns are statistically never more dangerous than when wielded by one's own government/military/police forces. (There are exceptions -- such as present-day life in America -- but they are historically anomalous and probably temporary.)
Good point, but even if the loss of privacy was symmetrical, it would still be a problem. Somewhat smaller problem, perhaps, but still a very serious problem.
In a world without privacy, the only things you could do/say/write would be the things that would offend nobody. You could not drink alcohol, since that would offend the teetotalers. You could not fly somewhere on vacation, since that would offend the environmentalists. You could not watch pornography or hire prostitutes since that would offend some feminists or religious conservatives. You could not eat meat, since that would offend vegans. You could not drive fast since that would offend those obsessed with safety. You could not make much money, since that would offend the socialists. You could not eat potato chips or drink soda since that would offend the health nuts. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Because, if you offend someone, that person will like you less and punish you in various ways. Not hire you for a job, not rent you an apartment, not invite you to a party, not cooperate if you're a co-worker, not have sex with you, not do you a favor, not do business with you, not greet you, not open the door for you when you have your hands full of groceries, not hold the elevator when they see you coming etc. etc. etc.
A world without privacy, even if that lack of privacy was totally symmetrical, and you could observe everything the government did, would be a world where you could not do/say/write a whole lot.
That's less "a world without privacy" and more "a world with easily offended people". This is not at all my experience in my culture. Here, if someone offends you, well, they're either a dick. Some people are dicks, you just shrug and move on.
At the bottom, there is the "Ten Commandments for Con Men". They include "wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them" and "let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones". There is a reason why con artists do this. People in general tend to like people who are similar to themselves, and often dislike people who are different.
Privacy makes it possible for people who are different from each other to live in harmony.
No, I definitely agree that we need privacy, I'm just saying that that's a bad example. A better argument and would be that, without privacy, there can be no social change, as e.g. homosexuality would forever be considered a mental illness and "treated". With privacy, society can involve in private until the new forms are strong enough to become mainstream.
I'd be okay with the NSA collecting everything if we could all access it. Having an elite, privileged 'security class' in society is absolutely heinous. But if the NSA could give Google a run for their money in terms of providing real service from the data they collect, in an open and transparent fashion, I think it'd be great for the world.
I know I for sure would benefit from being able to access my long-ago lost data again ..
> Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization.
>This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."
I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?
> I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit.
Privacy erosion is enhanced/enabled by use of technology, but it's ultimately a social issue. This is not an us-vs-skynet situation. Our society is simply organised incorrectly; power/control over private information is misallocated and the result is a privacy hostile world.
It's not the first time we've run into this kind of power misallocation. And we've solved a variety of them: slavery, women's suffrage, segregation, gay rights, etc. We've tackled privacy before [1] in the dead-tree context. We can fix social problems, and privacy/surveillance is one for our generation to handle.
Like I responded to the parallel commenter, I think social issues are driven by technology level, not the other way around. We have privacy issues because computing and the Internet, and we may solve them if the technology allows us, but I have a feeling it won't. All of history and numerous attempts at appealing to force change in people's characters (many of them ending bloody) tells us that, sans brainwashing[0], you can't make people do something else than whatever makes sense for them in their conditions by just asking nicely.
Society seems to be reaching a stable state given a particular technology level it has. As long as giving away privacy means people can get the things they want and need easier, they will give away privacy. Most people won't give up their Facebook or e-mail, or start learning how to do PGP because some vague notion of "privacy". OTOH, if the process reaches the point when giving away privacy actually starts to hurt them in a visible way, they'll start caring.
By the way, secrecy of correspondence is just a courtesy. Your letters don't get opened on the way because you live in a prospering state where people have better things to do than read your mail and couldn't care less about you personally. It wasn't and it isn't always the case; there are still countries in which you'd better not send money in an envelope.
We may, and will, develop some limits around individual privacy that will be similar to the privacy of correspondence - i.e. just courtesy. But it's important to recognize them for what they really are.
[0] - I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, but rather in a technical one. I grew up in a religion that is pretty serious about its beliefs and values. Most of the members were sincerely trying to improve their own characters, and would rather suffer horribly than lie or steal from a stranger. I saw that it's entirely possible to rewrite even scumbags to be like sheep, willing to help and improve lives of others, but it comes at a cost of accepting a particular belief system and joining close-knit communities that frequently remind themselves of their values and reasons for following them.
I agree that technology /enables/ behaviours, but it's people who use/abuse it and the society who needs to instate the controls.
If we attack this purely from a technological angle and manage to ramp up to ubiquitous E2E encryption, society can ban encryption: jailtime for possession of data that the government can't read. Is that a technology problem or a social problem?
> Most people won't give up their Facebook or e-mail, or start learning how to do PGP because some vague notion of "privacy".
This is a defeatist attitude. There's always going to be people who don't care. What's the voter turnout rate in your country? I'm sure you can find some starving people who will pick food over privacy, or some junkies who'll pick drugs. Those people are not part of the privacy conversation because they have other priorities.
Anyhow: the goal is not to nag everybody into locking up all their personal information. The goal is (or should be) to build a society where people have control over the dissemination of their personal details/communication, rather than "everything is collected by powerful entities, deal with it".
I think you are wrong. Social processes are driving us towards less privacy and not technology.
If we consider physical strength disparity between men and women, then an average strength man could rape as many women he likes, there is no technical restriction. Yet this does not happen.
I'm becoming more and more strongly convinced that technology is what drives social processes. I.e. feudalism because agriculture, reformation because printing press, women's right movements because wars and washing machines, privacy because dirt cheap computing and the Internet.
In a way, I feel social norms are like a gas in a multi-dimensional parameter space; they expand to cover all the volume allowed by the technology we have.
> In a way, I feel social norms are like a gas in a multi-dimensional parameter space; they expand to cover all the volume allowed by the technology we have.
I'd say if anything technology is a gas that fills a space restricted by both what is technically possible (both generally and for us in particular), and our social norms [0]. The (lack of) prevalence of rape is not just a result of the technical possibility and the efficiency of law enforcement. Most people don't want to do it, just like most people don't want to be terrorists, and like at least some people genuinely don't want to spy on others (which is hard to believe for some I know).
[0] that is, our individual choices - since individuals are the only place where things like norms, laws, societies, nations and even technology actually exist, as fragments that together with other fragments in other actually existing people form shape the emergent patterns and behaviours (in the context of technology: hardly anyone, if anyone, understands everything involved in making a CPU, and that involves medicine and food and infrastructure for the workers required, I really mean everything, which for even things much simpler than a CPU is a lot).
To consider technology or other things actual agents is just false IMHO, technology doesn't do anything, and it can be pretty much be forgotten within one generation. In that sense, it's not like gas at all, it doesn't just "march on" or "expand".
Yes, of course, some social processes are made available by technology, but this is not inevitable course.
I would say that agriculture made possible the first known democracy and women rights are still subpar in many parts of the world despite the washing machines.
I wish people would taboo[0] the word "privacy" in such discussions. They often mean too many too different things; the whole discussion is done at too low resolution.
Let me approach this from a purely historical angle;
First; to make the broad generalization that "everyone lived in small self-contained communities" is frankly laughable, assuming the statement isn't taken out of a context that constrains the "everyone" in that quote. Yes, we didn't have the megacities we have today, but you certainly couldn't say "everyone would know who was dating the baker's daughter" somewhere like Pompei or Tikal.
Secondly, even if you want to argue the cities case, national/international trade has existed almost as long as established civilization. It would have been VERY easy to move among trade lanes and find a new home, if your "anonymity" had been compromised in a way you didn't like in one place. Starting with a truly clean slate in the modern age is FAR more difficult; I'd argue that we've been slowly shrinking the degree of anonymity one can re-achieve. (there is good historical precedent for movement via trade if you look at, to pull one example off the top of my head, certain trade-oriented tribes in central-south native american culture. They would regularly spread out to other small groups in which their past was as anonymous as could possibly get; there is good record of american settlers traveling with them to embed themselves in the admittedly small tribal cultures, but the size alone does not moot ones ability to seek anonymity.)
Specifically he feels that the way Vint Cerf argued may have been applicable to his culture but many others less so.
His point was that privacy was present in many of these cultures before the advent of cities and that cities did not simply invent privacy out of thin air.
That said I think a lot of this is misconstruing on both sides.
My personal opinion is privacy and an expectation of it existed well before cities or even towns and that what really come with cities was anonymity. Which is a different concept entirely.
I think it would be fair to say if you sent a rider or a pigeon so a trusted advisor you had an expectation others would not hear/read your message, this is true of the postal system and one would expect of telephone and Internet communications.
However, things get really rough when cities happened. Because of the rise of anonymity law enforcement needed new powers to actually find perpetrators of crimes. As such some privacy was sacrificed in the name of making our communities safer. Mostly in the form of allowing law enforcement some limited wire tap and post interception powers.
Unfortunately this didn't map very well to the Internet because of the nature of the 2 mediums. Intercepting someones written and spoken communications between another human is one thing. Being able to spy on what is effectively their thoughts and interests is entirely another. The bandwidth and expression of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of today. They don't realise how much damage they are potentially doing to the future of such a promising system.
> However, things get really rough when cities happened
When did "cities happen"? Rome had more than a million residents about 2,000 years ago. Cities like Athens and Alexandria had over 100,000 residents centuries before that. I think I understand the point you're making, that anonymity within a community is easier to achieve when the community is large, but that's not the only anonymity available.
Before cities, we already had anonymity due to fleeting associations (e.g. nomadic groups, traveling merchants), due to separated communities (e.g. soldiers did not know each others' past, their homes would not have known their actions), or due to migration (e.g. leaving one community and joining another).
Those forms of anonymity have mostly disappeared, not because "cities happened", but because of better administration. So far, our administrative capability has always been limited by the amount of effort it required. What has changed with the Internet is that we now leave a (digital) papertrail of almost everything we do, so there is no longer an effort-based limit on the amount of records we can preserve.
That to me is what makes Cerf's comment unpalatable (I hadn't encountered it before): to pretend that "we've never had anonymity" is foolish at best, and manipulative at worst. Given his current employer, I'm more inclined towards the latter.
Another poster already commented that "what we now call privacy, used to be called freedom and liberty". I think that's a very good one-liner, but it's not really accurate: privacy is a requisite for freedom and liberty, but it's not the same thing. This is probably the first time (since the StaSi) that that requisite has come under so much attack, which is probably why it's receiving so much more attention than before.
It's (claimed to be) rubbish because thinking otherwise can be seen to weaken the privacy-champion's position. Many people have an instinct to "circle the wagons" around their personal ideological position, afraid to give an inch in case it becomes a mile.
I also think like Vint Cerf, that privacy is an artifact of modern society. I also think that since modern society is the one we find ourselves in, that privacy should be aggressively protected. Privacy is more important now than ever precisely because we're an urbanized and connected society.
I have never had a problem with an investigator hanging out somewhere writing down license plate numbers. But take issue with always-on automated license plate readers scanning where everyone is all the time. It's a difference in resources.
And to go full Godwin, the Nazis were far more effective with IBM's help.
> I also think that since modern society is the one we find ourselves in, that privacy should be aggressively protected. Privacy is more important now than ever precisely because we're an urbanized and connected society.
That's an interesting and important point I learned to appreciate in an explicit form only recently. Thank you for making it.
That said, I still don't see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy and progress? The always-on automated license plate readers exist because cameras and computing power are dirt chip now, and no amount of effort sans starting a third world war and rolling us back to medieval times will revert that. Laws are weaker than technology, and the current development will make it only easier to create more complex and cheaper machines that replicate various functions of humans, only faster and better.
We could try and fight for changes in law that would make mass-scale data collection illegal, but that would not make it impossible or unfeasible - it will only limit the access to "the good guys". So criminals, creeps and government services (at least those secret ones) will keep spying on us anyway, while we would be throwing away a lot of potential improvements and scientific advancements that could be enabled by a "god's eye" view.
And so I sometimes wonder, since we can't put the genie back in the box, and fighting it only means giving up our own powers while merely inconveniencing the bad guys, maybe we should just embrace the society that's becoming self-aware and make sure this awareness is put to a good use?
ETA:
> And to go full Godwin, the Nazis were far more effective with IBM's help.
True, but I don't think we should frame it as anything else as (1930/1940) IBM helping evil people who they know were evil. The Nazis were equally more effective with help of any other country that provided them with materials they used for war.
On the other hand, we are all better off thanks to IBM, so this can't be an argument against general-purpose computing, or punchcards and identification numbers.
> That said, I still don't see from a practical point, how we can expect to keep privacy and progress?
I don't follow. How are the two mutually exclusive? Your false dichotomy between license plate readers and medieval times isn't very convincing to me.
> Laws are weaker than technology
Really? So since it is technologically possible for me to remove my license plates from my car, no judge will be able to make me put them back?
And, since it is technologically possible, it is ok for others to clean out your bank account, and you would have no redress other than to hack your money back to you?
> I don't follow. How are the two mutually exclusive? Your false dichotomy between license plate readers and medieval times isn't very convincing to me.
What is the current direction of technological progress? More computing. Faster computing. More ubiquitous computing. More connectivity. Leveraging all that for optimization. Today we have cameras so small that every one is carrying two of them in their pocket. Tomorrow, at least one of which will be replaced or augmented with a geometry scanner. Scientists want to have nanosats in orbit that will keep continuous, real-time surveillance of the planet. Can't you really see that almost everything we do now erodes privacy?
Or in more theoretical sense - every single thing you do generates ripples in reality that spread and interact with other things (generating more ripples) with the speed of light. Every thing you say or do leaves traces. Most of them escape our notice, because there's only so much things we can pay attention to. But they are still there, and with more sensors and more computing powers, we're untangling the great web of causality. Whatever is not known we can try to infer. Privacy disappears with the amount of compute we can throw at it.
> Really? So since it is technologically possible for me to remove my license plates from my car, no judge will be able to make me put them back?
You know that your car probably has several RFID tags and radio chips in various places like e.g. tires? With time it may be the case that no judge will care to make you put them back - they won't need to.
Anyway, my point does not apply to individuals, but on a large scale. Whenever a new technology arrives that is so useful/popular that lots of people start to use it, laws and customs adjust to accomodate it. Since laws and customs follow technological progress and not the other way around, it follows that laws are weaker than technology.
It's shame that The Register had ruin a good story with their shoddy, tabloid-esque journalism by claiming that the UN privacy head called Vint Cerf "dumb". He never called him "dumb", he actually highlighted his intelligence but claimed that he said something "dumb". There's a huge difference. One implies a personal trait whereas the other refers to a single occurrence which may be an anomaly.
But if you look throughout UK history - the only freedoms they really cared about are the strong individual property rights. When property is equal-ish distributed - all the other rights also are. But with property increasingly concentrated ...
So this bills are not unexpected - they don't infringe on anyone's property - so they get a pass from the powerbrokers.
I'm 29 years old and I had only heard of Orwell in school when one of my English Literature teachers mentioned Animal Farm in a passing comment about Russia.
I had never read any Orwell works until 18, and that was entirely recreational and extra-curricular.
Imagine a new device to read and record people's thoughts at all time is invented.
That UK surveillance bill is "worse than scary" because according to how its proponents/supporters rationalize it, the logical consequence of this rationalization is that it's perfectly acceptable that all citizens should be permanently hooked to such device if it existed.
Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non-technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle.
I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.' Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with you...I KNOW you have shit to hide."
She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least.
So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing.
Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the pitchforks are still in garages.
Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings.
Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately want to believe they do.
As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically, discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and, frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum.
So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT much interest in her meant that she mattered?
I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the first place.
It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am, in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey, only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on.
I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2 deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay, feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.
"I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."
What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has destruction of privacy as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them).
Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)