Sepp Hasslberger contributed the following comment in Facebook:

“a friend in Sweden just wrote to me (after I had asked him if he has a facebook profile) asking: “… do you really want the NSA + Pentagon to know about all your friends.”

My reply was this … and I’d like to share it with you here to see whether my thoughts are completely strange or whether there is some resonance with what others here are thinking.

Here is what I wrote:

“… my feeling is that NSA and the Pentagon can already know all about my friends, whether I am on facebook or not.

Let’s not kid ourselves. They have been monitoring all phone traffic and certainly all emails going back and forth for a decade or more. There is nothing they cannot know about me, even if I am not on facebook.

However there is much I can gain from having an easy connection to friends, and being able to exchange news and ideas with them in a very simple way. So my reasoning has been: If the government can know what I am doing (because they obviously have all the possibilities to monitor any of my communications), then why should my friends not be able to know?

I know this is a radical departure from what we normally think, because “privacy” has been made into such a holy cow. In reality, if we look at privacy laws, they apply to us, but not to the covert government agencies. Although they nominally do apply, government has every possibility of keeping data on us in violation of privacy laws, while we do not have that same possibility (to keep our own files on people to find out what those in government and in the large corporations are up to).

So I believe that privacy is a red herring that has been thrown out for our consumption, while the intention is more to limit OUR capacity to investigate rather than protect our privacy. Conversely, privacy laws protect the privacy of government and huge corporations that don’t give a damn about the laws, and they prevent us from knowing what’s really going on.

Probably a MUCH more important concept than privacy is transparency.

We are already all but transparent to those government agencies that monitor just about everything.

What we should be demanding is that governments become as transparent as we are, rather than trying to cultivate the false idea of security that “privacy” affords us.”