Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate surveillance,” in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique surveillance,” in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.

Worth a read. The defender of the NSA policy seem to think this is a simple matter of privacy. It isn’t.