Eben Moglen is a law professor at Columbia. He's also one of the smartest people in the world on the social and legal issues of the internet. This is the third in a series of talks he's given for the Software Freedom Law Center. Despite the URL, it's not really about Snowden -- it's about privacy and it's essential role in the future of democracy.

Quoting at length to encourage you to read the whole piece:

  I would urge you also to consider that privacy is an 
  ecological rather than a transactional substance. This is 
  a crucial distinction from what you are taught to believe 
  by the people whose job it is to earn off you.

  Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a  
  thing you transact about with them, just the two of you. 
  They offer you free email service, in response to which 
  you let them read all the mail, and that’s that. ...

  This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection,
  misleading, and plain lying proposition. Because—as I 
  suggested in the analytic definition of the components of
  privacy—privacy is always a relation among people. It is
  not transactional, an agreement between a listener or a
  spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied on.

  If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide
  email service for you for free as long as it can all be 
  read, then everybody who corresponds with you has been 
  subjected to the bargain, which was supposedly bilateral
  in nature. 

  ...

  Environmental law is not law about consent. It’s law about 
  the adoption of rules of liability reflecting socially 
  determined outcomes: levels of safety, security, and 
  welfare.

  When you take a subject which has previously been subject  
  to environmental regulation and you reduce it to 
  transactionality—even for the purpose of trying to use 
  market mechanisms to reduce the amount of pollution going 
  on—you run into people who are deeply concerned about the 
  loss of the idea of a socially established limit. You must 
  show that those caps are not going readily to be lifted in 
  the exhilarating process, the game, of trading.

  But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool 
  ourselves—or rather, we have allowed our lawyers to fool 
  themselves and them to fool everybody else—into the 
  conclusion that what is actually a subject of   
  environmental regulation is a mere matter of bilateral 
  bargaining. A moment’s consideration of the facts will 
  show that this is completely not true.

  ...

  It is technically feasible for Google to make Gmail into a 
  system which is truly secure and secret for its users. In 
  which mail is encrypted—using public keys in a web of 
  trust—within users’ own computers, in their browsers, and 
  in which email at rest at Google is encrypted using 
  algorithms to which the user rather than Google has the 
  relevant keys.

  This means donating Gmail’s scant profit to the world, 
  consistent with the idea that the Net belongs to its users 
  throughout the world. Which, in the long run it is good 
  for Google to be seen not only to believe, but to act 
  upon.

  There are many, many, very thoughtful, capable, dedicated   
  people at Google who must choose either between doing what 
  is right or naming what is wrong.

  The situation at Facebook is different. Facebook is strip-
  mining human society.

  The idea of social sharing, in a context in which the 
  service provider reads everything and watches everybody 
  watch, is inherently unethical.

  But we need no more from Facebook than truth in labeling.

  We need to no rules, no punishments, no guidelines. We 
  need nothing but the truth.

  Facebook should lean in and tell its users what it does.

  It should say "We watch you every minute that you’re here. 
  We watch every detail of what you do, what you look at, 
  who you’re paying attention to, what kind of attention 
  you’re paying, what you do next, and how you feel about it 
  based on what you search for.

  “We have wired the web so that we watch all the pages that 
  you touch that aren’t ours, so that we know exactly what 
  you’re reading all the time, and we correlate that with 
  your behaviour here.”

  To every parent Facebook should say, “Your children spend 
  hours every day with us. Every minute of those hours, we 
  spy upon them more efficiently than you will ever be able 
  to.”

  Only that, just the truth. That will be enough.

Amen.