When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public - the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.

Information wants to eat brie.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.

We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others.