Schneier on Risks of Data Reuse

In a typically cogent and lucid fashion Schneier examines some fundamental questions in this essay on the risks of data resuse:

History will record what we, here in the early decades of the information age, did to foster freedom, liberty and democracy. Did we build information technologies that protected people's freedoms even during times when society tried to subvert them? Or did we build technologies that could easily be modified to watch and control? It's bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.