It&#x27;s worth reading the rest of it too.<p>Specifically he feels that the way Vint Cerf argued may have been applicable to his culture but many others less so.<p>His point was that privacy was present in many of these cultures before the advent of cities and that cities did not simply invent privacy out of thin air.<p>That said I think a lot of this is misconstruing on both sides.<p>My personal opinion is privacy and an expectation of it existed well before cities or even towns and that what really come with cities was anonymity. Which is a different concept entirely.<p>I think it would be fair to say if you sent a rider or a pigeon so a trusted advisor you had an expectation others would not hear&#x2F;read your message, this is true of the postal system and one would expect of telephone and Internet communications.<p>However, things get really rough when cities happened. Because of the rise of anonymity law enforcement needed new powers to actually find perpetrators of crimes. As such some privacy was sacrificed in the name of making our communities safer. Mostly in the form of allowing law enforcement some limited wire tap and post interception powers.<p>Unfortunately this didn&#x27;t map very well to the Internet because of the nature of the 2 mediums. Intercepting someones written and spoken communications between another human is one thing. Being able to spy on what is effectively their thoughts and interests is entirely another. The bandwidth and expression of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of today. They don&#x27;t realise how much damage they are potentially doing to the future of such a promising system.