By 1990s, the conditions were in place for a privacy renaissance. For the first time in history, the average person had access to encryption technology that was light years beyond what most governments had known before. The flagbearer of this revolution was Philip Zimmerman and his Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which brought strong encryption to millions. Sure, by modern standards PGP 1.0 was a terrible flaming piece of crap. But it was a miraculous piece of crap. And it quickly got better. If we just hung in there, the dream told us, the future would bring us further miracles, things like perfect cryptographic anonymity and untraceable electronic cash.

And so we all held a million key signing parties and overlooked a few glaring problems with the software we were using. After all, these would be resolved. Once we convinced the masses to come along with us, the future would be encrypted and paid for with e-Cash spent via untraceable electronic networks on software that would encrypt itself when you were done using it. The world would never be the same.

Obviously none of this actually happened.

If you sent an email today -- or texted, or made a phone call -- chances are that your communication was just as insecure as it would have been in 1990. Maybe less so. It probably went through a large service provider who snarfed up the cleartext, stuffed it into an advertising algorithm, then dropped it into a long term data store where it will reside for the next three years. It's hard to be private under these circumstances.