He makes a wonderfully eloquent case for why priacy is crucial. Great tool for when someone protests about terrorist and criminals being the only ones who would want do or say anything in secret. (Thanks to @BenMS for posting it on the Development forum.)
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Awareness of Bentham’s Panopticon (which is of course the all seeing top of pyramid elite eye) may have been part of what caused Louise Brandeis to suggest the best basis for right claims (problematic given what Hume said about rights.) is privacy.
What’s happened in the US since 911 looks pretty deliberate, loss of Habeus Corpus etc. 911 was a coup and it needs to be reversed. But then it seems so were the Kennedy assassinations, the Nixon regime and the initial election of W., none of it properly investigated. What Google and Facebook are doing are in line with the surveillance state, its just civilian commercial camouflage, its spying as commodity, tricking the public into tying a noose around its own neck.
From a practical perspective, when having a network that is public at its foundation, like today’s Internet, then it requires a lot of messy ad hoc additional protection mechanisms just to make it private. Compare that with a network that is private and protected at the foundation where making information - that people themselves want to publish - public, is a piece of cake.