"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That statement is nothing shy of a Full Monty disgrace to free enterprise. Nobody ever has a nice thing to say about government, and this leads to the comforting illusion that we can devolve the beast of government (for the most part) to the free market where much of government's function would be better served, until some high and mighty idiot in the private sector comes around saying something like this and bursting everyone's happy bubble. Well done, Eric, running the graduated approach to managing one's personal boundaries straight to the tip heap, for the betterment of all society. Yes, this is exactly what government by quarterly report will look like when that fine day finally comes. Book it.
There has never in history been a society that has strayed so far into the glass fishbowl: in a closed community where no behaviour goes unnoticed, living quiet lives of desperation is the order of business. Woe to anyone who dares to shirk this shackle (a theme of the very difficult movie Breaking the Waves). And yet, this too is not enough?
What a pompous ass to make such a remark. So close, and yet so far. Google could have been so much worse. For a long stretch, their sane and (relatively) moral decisions far outweighed their missteps. Then they caught wind of Facebook eating their lunch, and now they seem hell-bent on making up for lost time. I can barely express my disgust at the implications of that remark.
There's that old joke about Gates declared darkness "the new standard". Now we have Schmidt declaring the naked light bulb in the holding cells of the Lubyanka as the new, unceasing dawn.
I was reading about circadian phase entrainment the other day. In the hamster model (which I say generically, forgetting the precise rodent flavour) they use constant dim light to establish the free running state (which is actually the free running state in constant dim light). They don't use constant bright light, because constant bright light causes the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus to lose synchrony (effectively destroying the body's internal circadian signal altogether). In the torture setting--if that is in fact the purpose of the unblinking naked light bulb hanging above arm's reach in every cell--loss of circadian rhythm would have an effect on sleep that would promptly dissolve and disintegrate all sense of perspective and self-hood. This is, of course, what they wish to achieve. One doesn't torture the whole man, one tortures the wretched shell, so that the whole man shall never take up residence ever again.
Praise be to Google, keeper of the constant light.