The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.

Andrew Leonard writes about the interaction of open source, private industry, and government intelligence agencies in Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together. I think the piece is perhaps a bit too negative, I’ll try to follow up on that later.