On Riots and Social Networks

When the UK authorities found out that the protestors have used social networks to organize themselves, the question whether to monitor those telecommunication channels or not has risen. It reminded me of the good old logic question:
Merry's father has five daughters: Nana, Nena, Nina, Nona. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

The answer, as you've probably guessed correctly, is... Merry. It is a classical distraction question. Just as the monitoring question is, if we formulate it in more accurate way: The poor people of the UK got out on the streets and used: facebook, Twitter, Blackberry to do that. What do we have to do to solve the problem? Just as the answer to the previous question isn't Nuna or Nyna, the answer to this question isn't to monitor social networks, than to solve the real problems in the the UK society. I don't have enough information to decide who's right, the protestors or the establishment, but I don't have to be there in order to know that the people have a reason, justified or not, to organize themselves and the communication tools are not the essence of the problem.

Another reason to get off the idea of monitoring social networks is the price of monitoring. It costs money! It seems much more logical to me to invest this money in real problems solution and not to enrich already rich technology companies that will be the only ones to benefit from the monitoring.

The questions which the ordinary man, who has no plans to rise against the government, has to ask is whether we can trust social networks to keep our communication private, even if we decide to do something that is considered as unacceptable? Who will decide where is the border between our right for privacy and the need for security? The first answer that pops up is to remain the social networks to function as neutral tools for communication as it suppose to be today. On the other hand, most of the existing communication tools, like telephony, for example, aren't neutral. Is the fact that we already gave up the neutrality in most of the channels, gives legitimacy to take our privacy from the social networks, too?

I'm, personally, looking at the social networks as a public communication channel, like talking with someone in the middle of the street. I'm not even trying to block the access to the content I'm generating, I simply don't generate content that shouldn't be public. It is the only advice I can give in this complicated semi-philosophical discussion.

Please share your opinion, maybe we can get to more creative solutions together.