Privacy under attack, part II: the solution is in the hands of the people

[Commentary] Edward Snowden has revealed problems for which we need solutions. The vast surveillance-industrial state that has grown up since 2001 could not have been constructed without government contractors and the data-mining industry. Both are part of a larger ecological crisis brought on by industrial overreaching.

We have failed to grasp the nature of this crisis because we have misunderstood the nature of privacy. Businesses have sought to profit from our confusion, and governments have taken further advantage of it, threatening the survival of democracy itself. The real problem is that we are losing the anonymity of reading, for which nobody has contracted at all.

We have lost the ability to read anonymously, but the loss is concealed from us because of the way we built the web. We gave people programs called "browsers" that everyone could use, but we made programs called "web servers" that only geeks could use log.

In particular, the anonymity of reading is broken by the collection of metadata. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery.

Our politics can't wait. Not in the US, where the war must end. Not around the world, where people must demand that governments fulfil the basic obligation to protect their security.

[Moglen is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is founder, director-counsel and chairman of Software Freedom Law Centre]