<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/11/can-we-talk-in-confidence-the-...> "Dance like no one is watching,” the American journalist Olivia Nuzzi wrote in 2014. “Email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.” Nuzzi’s advice could have saved Kim Darroch an awful lot of trouble. The UK ambassador to the US has just been forced to resign after describing Donald Trump and his administration as “inept” and “uniquely dysfunctional” in diplomatic memos that were subsequently leaked to the Mail on Sunday. Darroch’s crime is hardly one of inaccuracy. The only person in the world who seems to disagree with the ambassador’s assessment is Trump himself, who called the civil servant “wacky” and “very stupid” in a dysfunctional series of tweets on Tuesday. But there is no denying that the memos were, well, not particularly diplomatic. An important skill of an ambassador to the US is to balance two competing requirements: to honestly report to your superiors the fact that the president is inept, while remaining chummy with the inept president. Darroch is not the first person to face trouble over seemingly private thoughts becoming public. Emails get hacked and published (awkward revelations, Donna Brazile); microphones thought to be turned off are actually broadcasting (better apologise, Gordon Brown); documents get released under freedom of information or data protection laws (be more circumspect, GCHQ); old blogposts are rediscovered in a new light (get deleting, Ben Bradley) … the list seems never-ending. [...] The death of frankness is one symptom of the wider dearth of ambient privacy in our daily lives. The cheery Silicon Valley surveillance state that prevents us from speaking plainly in private is the same one that requires us to warn our children – or be warned by our parents – not to post things online that might harm employment prospects, and the same one that ensures we vet every utterance to make sure that it doesn’t take on some darker meaning outside of the context in which it was presented. There is no external agent mandating this self-censorship, at least not in the west: in China and Saudi Arabia, Cegłowski notes, the same capacity is used as a tool of social control. In the UK and the US, “We’re using it to show ads. But the infrastructure of total surveillance is everywhere the same, and everywhere being deployed at scale.” [...]