Speaking in Public isn't private - and the internet is a public space

With all the scandal around Edward Snowden I have to say I'm mostly in the camp of 'surely everyone knew that spying agencies spied on people?', but the most surprising is when it comes to the 'scandal' that they might be listening to our communications over the internet.

The internet?  The one created and originally funded by DARPA?  The open internet with the IP protocol that means packets are by default openly routed and unencrypted?

Or do you mean SMTP with its unencrypted openly routed emails?

Or HTTP with its unencrypted data?  Even HTTPS only encrypts the data, you can still openly find out what page someone was looking at in terms of the IP address just not the data being exchanged.

Seriously did anyone actually think that people are not watching this stuff?  When did this become a surprise?  I knew that 30 years ago people were spying on this.  Didn't we all have a .sigs back then that said 'Hello to my friends in Cheltenham and Langley'?

Agencies have spied on people, even allies in fact maybe ESPECIALLY allies for hundreds of years.  Its the whole point of funding spying agencies and the internet just makes that spying easier.  Its a public conversation that you are having on Twitter, Facebook or over email.  You might think its private but its really just shouting out of a window and public speech isn't something you should be surprised if its being tracked.

This isn't a question of 'only the innocent have nothing to fear' but its a question that actually by bringing this more into the open we risk it being used beyond its current scope of spies and into regular police forces and its that which would scare me more.  The whole risk is that spying becomes a mainstream police activity not something from specialist organisations whose primary focus is on genuine national threats, not someone forgetting to put the garbage bin out on a Tuesday night.

Spying is real, it has been for hundreds of years and its sadly got a place in a world of cyber and other terrorist threats.  That people have got upset about the tracking of information over public networks says much more about the lack of understanding of how the Internet works than of a big brother state that is completely new.

The internet was better before...

Over the past few years I've heard lots of complaints about 'the internet was better before everyone used Facebook' and it got me thinking.  That much like the strata in rocks you can determine your geological internet age based on the first thing you remember complaining about.  So moving backwards

Smartazoic - the modern era (2011 to present)
If you haven't yet complained about the new entry into the internet of any groups at all then the odds are that you are part of the latest major influx characterised by a dominance of mobile usage.

Socialem - the social era (2009-2010)
Socialem's are characterised by their complaints that things were much better before everyone started using mobile phones to use Facebook or other social media sites.  These people complain bitterly about instagram.

Broadem - the broadband era (2003-2008)
This is the era of major adoption of broadband and the rise of YouTube these people tend to complain about the rise of Facebook and other social media sites and don't understand why people can't just be happy with Yahoo and BBC News.  They complain that all these new 'social' users are just adding rubbish to the internet rather than the managed content of their day.

AOLem - the dialup era (1998-2002)
This is the era of the mainstream pioneers, the people who used AOL and other elements to get online.  People who remember what lag really is and complained bitterly about the new stupid sites with their insane bandwidth requirements and 'why oh why would anyone want to watch video'.  Their complaint was that the broadem era took away the 'personal' nature of a dial-up modem and also meant that they couldn't use their home connection when they went to their parents or friends house.  The explosion of broadband also meant there were 'too many people' around.

Establishism - the foundations of the WWW (1994-1997)
These are the folks who had access before the dialup era and who complained bitterly as AOLers started coming into Usenet and ruining the internet.  These folks used the WWW in fact many built the WWW but a distain was had for those who hadn't coped with Mosaic.

Jurrassic - Before WWW (1980-1993)
These are the folks who had network connections and lived in FTP, MUDS, telnet and Usenet and bemoaned the sudden lack of technical skills required to 'browse' these new fangled websites.  What was the fun in something that displayed an image in one go rather than requiring a uuencode/decode process?

So which era do you belong to?  Or are there other classifications and strata that should be used?