In light of the recent remarkable revelations about the reach of the surveillance state, author Sue Halpern will reflect on what it really means to be connected to the Internet. As she I wrote in the 50th Anniversary Issue of the NY Review of Books, "There is so much that has been good—which is to say useful, entertaining, inspiring, lucrative, fun—about the evolution of the World Wide Web—that questions about equity and inequality may seem to be beside the point. But while we were having fun, we have happily and willingly made the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings gives governments and businesses countless threads to pull..."