All the people who thought that Europe was a haven of privacy need to think again. Europe is making great strides toward building a corporate-government surveillance axis with this mandate. This untargeted, general warrant to search the population is probably appealing to law enforcement interests.

The common idea that the cost of data storage is rapidly becoming zero is plainly wrong when you are talking about terabytes of data. It will cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to securely store the data in usable form. Europeans will end up paying a great deal more for communications so their privacy can be undone.

It helps in two ways. One, it's going to cause consumers to think twice. They're going to say, now, what is happening? They'll read privacy policies. They'll decide not to do business with companies that share data willy-nilly.

I'm excited because we have never before in the 10 years of effort that many people have been putting into this, we have never had so many pieces working together.

The camel's nose may be smaller, but it's still sneaking under the tent.

The Internet is an agreement to use a small number of communications protocols, and it needs almost no governance at all.

It's a classic mission-creep situation. These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous.

They should definitely abide by their privacy policies. The irony is rich.

This is the camel's nose under the tent for using search engines and all kinds of data aggregators as surveillance tools.

This is a symbol of what's to come - that is, the government expecting to be able to dip into private databases to do all kind of surveillance and research.