Peggy Noonan - What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

by Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
August 18, 2013

What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious?

Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past?

We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror.

Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

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Among the pertinent definitions of privacy from the Oxford English Dictionary: "freedom from disturb…