I’ve written many times that privacy as we used to define it is never coming back, not with the tools we now have at our disposal. However, I’m the silliest man in cyberspace. But the person labeled (much to his dismay) as the “most dangerous man in cyberspace,” the cybersecurity expert Jacob Appelbaum, feels similarly. Perhaps you’ll listen to him. The opening of a Vice interview with Appelbaum by John Lubbock:

“Vice:

What would you say is the best way to understand the internet, rather than thinking of it as just ‘cyberspace’?

Jacob Appelbaum: 

There’s no real separation between the real world and the internet. What we’ve started to see is the militarization of that space. That isn’t to say that it just started to happen, just that we’ve started to see it in an incontrovertible, ‘Oh, the crazy paranoid people weren’t crazy and paranoid enough,’ sort of way. In the West, we see extreme control of the internet—the NSA/GCHQ stuff like the quantum insertion that Der Spiegel just covered… theTempora program. Really, these aren’t about controlling the internet, it’s about using the internet to control physical space and people in physical space. That is to say they’re using the internet as a gigantic surveillance machine. And because you can’t opt out of the machine anymore, it’s a problem.”