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created logs to track the traffic in and out of the servers. “It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world,” Moglen said. “It’s a very good idea.”
    However, the logs had a second effect: they became a history of every inquiry that users made, any communications they had—their clicks onwebsites to get the news, gossip, academic papers; to buy music or to stream pornography; to sign in to a bird-watchers’ website or to look at the latest snapshots of the birth of the universe from NASA and of the outfit that Lady Gaga wore to a nightclub the night before. The existence of these logs was scarcely known to the public.
    â€œWe kept the logs, that is, information about the flow of information on the net, in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled, or thought they controlled, the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives,” Moglen said. “This was a recipe for disaster.”
    No one making decisions about the architecture of the Internet, Moglen said, discussed its social consequences; the scientists involved were not interested in sociology or social psychology, or, for the most part, freedom. “So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse. Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused, and now we are getting the misuse that we set up.”
    The logs created as diagnostic tools for broken computers were quickly transformed into a kind of CT scan of the people using them, finely scaled maps of their minds. “Advertising in the twentieth century was a random activity; you threw things out and hoped they worked. Advertising in the twenty-first century is an exquisitely precise activity.”
    These developments, Moglen said, were not frightening. But, he warned: “We don’t remain in the innocent part of the story for a variety of reasons.
    â€œI won’t be tedious and Marxist on a Friday night and say it’s because the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in destructively reinventing and improving its own activities. And I won’t be moralistic on a Friday night and say that it is because sin is ineradicable and human beings are fallen creatures and greed is one of the sins we cannot avoid committing. I will just say that as an ordinary social process, we don’t stop at innocent. We go on. Which is surely the thing you should say on a Friday night. And so we went on.
    â€œNow, where we went on—is really toward the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything. Because once you have the logs of everything, then every simple service is suddenly a gold mine waiting to happen. And we blew it, because thearchitecture of the net put the logs in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the fallen state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble. And we got it.”
    The locus of temptation, to dawdle with Moglen in the metaphysical, is not an actual place: the servers that held all this succulent data were not necessarily in a single physical location. Once the data was dragnetted from someone’s Facebook entries, for instance, they could be atomized, the pieces spread across many servers, and then restored in a wink by software magic. The data was in a virtual place, if one that was decidedly not virtuous. The data was in the cloud, and thus beyond the law.
    â€œYou can make a rule about logs, or data flow, or preservation, or control, or access, or disclosure,” Moglen said, “but your laws are human laws, and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two, or three, or six, or poof! I just realized I’m subject to regulation, I think I’ll move to Oceania now.
    â€œWhich means that, in effect, we