1. Work to *give* users software freedom (e.g., work for patent system reform, write and share free software, etc.)
2. Work to *teach* users software freedom (e.g., instead of explaining the way that open source lowers the share of labor costs born by each direct consumer of that labor, explain how the four freedoms help to protect users from the developers of the software they run).
3. Work to *teach* users about the kinds of conflicts of rights that software freedom implies: (e.g., the perils of Google, the unfair labor practices of GNU/Linux vendors).
4. Work to *constructively resolve* those conflicts of rights without compromising the rights themselves (e.g., don’t try to “regulate our way out of the conflict” by now trying to take back some software freedoms).

This year Google was forced to hand over a lot of data to Viacom in their lawsuit. Will advertisers be forced to hand over their intel to the state?

Maybe, maybe not.

If they are forced to, will that be bad?

Yes, I’d say so. The US actively disappears, murders, imprisons innocents without accountability or warning and intentionally deceives people. The UK government is complicit with the US in that kind of thing. More specifically to this context, Yahoo is infamous for handing over bloggers to the PRC.

Most people are not aware of those things happening, because they have not been very visible; as RMS recently blogged, “The End of America, by Naomi Wolf, warned that the US had gone nearly all the way towards a police state, and that the full-blown tyranny only becomes unmistakably visible at the last stage. That last stage may be now.”

Similar, most people aren’t aware of the comparising Tom is drawing.

Does Google’s advertising programs do things that are objectionable and deeply problematic? Yes. Does that make them secret police? No. Tom is playing rhetorical games, not making genius arguments.