First I want to congratulate the EFF in all the great work they do. Thank you guys.

Second I want to address a problem that concerns me a lot and that I see again in this discussion. I have a huge problem with equating the facebooks and googles with the NSA. Some people make it seam as if the NSA (and simular) are the lesser or at least equall evil compared to Google, Facebook and co.

I think this is madness, how can we compare companys that try to sell us ads with a organisation is sending policy and millitary forces to peoples houses all over the world and puts them in prison or even kill them. In what world are we more afraid of a company that overs us 10% of the laptop you thought about buying compared to the serious danger that the NSA posses to democracy, libery and peace. I am unable to understand this position, I would rather have 100 Googles and 100 Facebooks then 1 NSA and I live in a country thta is in frindly relations with the US, if it were otherwise I would rather have 1000 Googles or Facebooks.

I dont want to come accross a defender of big buissness, in a parallel world where there is no NSA and no mass government survallance I would happly join the facebook bashing. I would happly lament the fact that gmail has centralised your email to much. But in this world, those are things that I dont think about a lot, or rather I think about it only in the context of the NSA.

Some people argue that its the fault of Google and Facebook that the internet is centralised and this makes the internet easy meat for the NSA, they then go on to argue that Google and Facebook are basiclly just as bad as the NSA because they helped in the process. This kind of argumentation relies on many assumtion that are, at least in my mind, not at all valid.

First, you assume that the internet would not be centralised without these companys. This is not at all clear, we see a again and again that centralisation has benefits for many users and for the companys itself. It is simply good buissness to gather data, every startup does it and every big company does it too. Any company that does not do so is very likly not going to be the next Google or Facebook. I love OpenWispherSystem and use there products but they are not going to be the next Google.

Second, you assume that centralisation allways makes syping easier and I question this too. Compared to a cyper punk future of peer-to-peer darknet full crypto, onion routing, forward secret (add more crypto buzzwords) this is of course the case but compared to the likly alternative its not that bad. Even for very good technical people like the people in this forum it is hard and very time consuming to run there own mail servers, and use PGP. The likly alternative is people running a non updated box of a old OS with old tools that are bound together by handnitted crypto (if any). We have learned from XP, IE6 and things like that that you simply can not really on common people to keep up to date with features, let alone security.

Without getting a hole lot better at OpenSource and peer-to-peer we will not create a digital revolution. I am still up for trying and will help where I can to make that future happen eventually and I hope you will do so to. But in the mean time we have Google and Facebook. While I do not expect much from the morality (I do expect a little) I hope they are at least smart enougth to protect there own data from the government and the competition. Facebook is using fantastic crypto in Whatsapp, Google has started to use better encryption internally and is fighing on many other fronts. These technical changes will hurt the NSA, this is afterall a fight on economics (cost/benefit of mass survaillance) and 600 million encrypted chat users will cost the NSA, even if they can get at the data by hacking every single smartphone on the planet.

The worst things Google or Facebook could do to me would be unpleasent, the worst thing that the NSA could do is hard to even imagen. The NSA and secret services like it are amung the biggest danger to our freedoms and it does not matter on what side of the politcal spectrum you are, guns are at risk as much as healthcare.

tl;dr:
So lets first worry about evil goverment that have SWAT teams and drones and then worry about to much ads.