Over the last 20 years we, the public, have gotten all kinds of new online toys to play with and we love them. Marvel at every new level we reach. During the airline outage caused by the plane crash at SFO, it was amazing how much more quickly those of us who were connected to Twitter got the info we needed than most of the people who were without it. In the future it will likely only get better, unless the airlines are scared of it, and decide to limit what we can do with the Internet connections we have while we're flying. That could also happen.

But at the same time, the spies have been getting their own version of the power. And of course since they're all about secrecy (another form of privacy) they don't tell the rest of us about their toys. Until someone with a lot of courage and skill cracks their code and shares the info with the rest of us.

It's a two-way street. What they do to us can be done to them.

The spies and the elected officials they either work for or control (probably more the latter than the former) are not likely to continue to enjoy the invisibility they've had up till now. Of course they probably have powers we know nothing of, and are quickly developing Plan B and Plan C. Remember when Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, was calling for a Kill Switch for the Internet. That probably wasn't an idle threat.