Discussion
After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/11/02/agony-verification/#great-turnbulls-ghost
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It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into *every* microchip (no, really):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
The NSA managed to enact a total prohibition on civilian access to working encryption, on the grounds that we're all safer if our spooks can spy on "bad guys" even if that means that every creep, petty crook, corporate or state-sponsored spy, and mafia can spy on *us*:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein-2/#win-some-lose-some
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Even after that ban was overturned, governments encouraged the private sector to spy on us without limit, precaution or permission. Those private-sector troves of intimate, compromising data about every person alive constitute a warrantless, off-the-books surveillance system that cops, spies and government agencies can tap at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/#nobus
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To protect these surveillance capabilities, private firms and governments colluded to pass "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer our devices and apps to add privacy blockers to them, with the effect that every device we own and every app we use spies on us constantly:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
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At the same time, states either failed to pass new privacy laws (as in the USA, where federal consumer privacy law was last updated in 1988), or passed privacy laws that went unenforced (as in the EU, where "pretending to be Irish" allows US tech giants to flout EU privacy law):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
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Our surveillance free-for-all world is objectively very bad. Over and over, companies and agencies who were permitted to nonconsensually harvest and retain our data demonstrate they are not capable of keeping that data safe, and no matter how badly they fuck up, nothing changes. It's been nearly a decade since Equifax doxed *148 million* Americans and not only is the company still in business, they've been permitted to buy up and absorb *more* commercial surveillance firms.
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US regulators let Equifax buy Teletrack in 2021. Canadian regulators let them buy the Food Industry Credit Bureau in 2023. The same year, Brazilian regulators let Equifax buy Boa Vista Serviços. This all despite the fact that Equifax blamed its breach on shitty security practices after a string of mergers that led to it haphazardly combining databases from newly acquired surveillance companies.
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Data isn't the new oil. Data is the new oily rag: profitable only if you can warehouse it in vast quantities under unsafe conditions and have society pick up the bill for every conflagration:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/
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Equifax is a serial reoffender, but rather than getting the corporate death-penalty, they've been made to pay coins-down-the-back-of-the-sofa fines that amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costs they imposed on society by amassing these vast, flaming storehouses of oily rags.
Why *wouldn't* Equifax reoffend? Our policymakers keep demanding *less* privacy, not more, and their indifference to the consequences is (almost) comical.
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Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister who uttered what remains, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing anyone anywhere has *ever* said about tech policy. Like many of his peers before, during, and since his reign, Turnbull had been trying to outlaw working encryption, insisting that every device have a Bill Clinton-esque back-door for the purpose of spying on "bad guys."
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When told that the laws of mathematics dictated that any measure that let Australia's cops spy on "bad guys" would also let bad guys spy on Australians, Turnbull replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/
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We could laugh Turnbull off...if he was an outlier. But while Turnbull had the world's stupidest rejoinder to the scientifically irrefutable fact that banning encryption will let bad guys hack *everything*, he was hardly alone in wanting to ban encryption. Banning encryption is *current* policy in Canada:
It's also current policy in the UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/
And in the EU:
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The difference between Malcolm Turnbull and, say, Canadian PM Mark Carney is that Turnbull was stupid enough to try to defend his ban on encryption, while Carney simply shakes his head at his critics' naivete and continues to press forward with his catastrophic proposal to welcome every cybercriminal in the world to hack every morsel of Canadian data.
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When it comes to bad privacy policy, our political classes aren't content to rest on their laurels: hardly a week goes by without news of a new way to encourage (or even *require*) the private sector to recklessly collect and retain our data, despite the *dead certainty* that this data will eventually end up breaching and getting plastered all over the internet.
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The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable *and* foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
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Pluralistic: The internet was made for privacy (31 Oct 2025)