There was a fascination with using encryption to make hackers potentially as powerful as governments, and that disturbed me. I could feel the surge of ego: We hackers could change history. But if there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world. Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline as much as anything else.

EFF has matured, and is now moderate enough to be subject to occasional attacks from outfits like Anonymous (though Anonymous rejects characterizations of itself as a group of people and prefers to be known as collective cyber-brain.) In its early days, however, EFF helped glamourize the image of the encrypted nerd resisting the government. EFF was hardly alone: One of the first covers of Wired magazine featured a dashing gaggle of outlaw hackers, faces hidden by scarves. The hacker as glamorous revolutionary was a guiding image as the Internet was first coming together and being polished for widespread use a couple of decades ago, and we are paying now for our silly romanticism back then.

When you feel that urge to power within yourself- that is when you should be most careful. When I hear Julian Assange talk about "crushing bastards" I feel grateful that I avoided getting swept up back then.

Should information flows be controlled in the network age? Who should get to decide who gets access to what information? It's not as if these questions have only been asked for the first time because of the Internet. The many generations of people that learned how to build democracies wrestled with them over the centuries.

We know what the answers are. If the secret is about something that isn't a vital interest for other people, then everyone has a right to keep a private sphere private. If the secret is about something of vital interest to other people, then secrets can be kept by those who are sanctioned and accountable to keep them within the bounds of a reasonably functional democratic process.

Both of these answers are under assault by the ideology of nerd supremacy which I understand well, since I was part of it in its early days.

You need to have a private sphere to be a person, or for that matter for anything creative to happen in any domain. This is the principle I described as "encapsulation" in You Are Not a Gadget. I have written about this idea in various ways, but I'd like to try another way here, addressed to the truest believers. Let's consider encapsulation in computer code.

There was a time when computer code was messier, in that any piece of code could read or write to any other part. That didn't work out well. Programs were too tangled and impossible to maintain.

So a movement to add structure to programming took root. For instance, the idea of "object oriented" code breaks a program up into encapsulated modules centered on chunks of data and code related specifically to that data. If you program in an object oriented way, you are not allowed to make the code in one object directly manipulate the interior of another. Instead, everything has to go through the proper channels.