What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

Peggy Noonan - What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious? ✧ Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past? ✧ We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror. ✧ Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

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