I've had a few discussions about this and found a few possible conclusions and resources here. Thought I'd post them on the site and see if anyone had any input.
Here to stay
If it's not the US government, it's China or companies that make their money building libraries of consumer data. It's also only going to get worse. There will only ever be more Internet monitoring, more video cameras, and more tools built to help detect and intelligently guess about those it analyzes.
Everyone has something to hide
Although we can probably all name off a
few experiments over time in near-total openness, nobody to date has opened up their email, life, and every other aspect of their business to the general public. Because companies that control information on your past, current behavior, ad purchases can make this data public either as a threat or by accident/theft, you
do have something to protect. It's something I try to make clear to people I know who want to talk to me using regular communication. It's either that or sanitize your communications to remove anything remotely personal, which is what people have to do in China.
This is still not okay
This stuff exists because everyone thinks it's either not a threat or necessary to freedom, even if its
littered with problems (no oversight, hiding screw ups under "state secrets," unclear if it's better than standard police work). I think it's important to push back against this by taking
political action, whatever your country or situation. Apathy is just feeding this.
Steps to take
There are
tools you can use on a local level to help regain or maintain your freedom and privacy.
None are perfect, but as these groups have a finite number of resources to spend, they can't backdoor every program and check every connection. Further, many secure programs are just as good or better than their insecure counterparts (I much prefer Pidgin with OTR to Google Talk), and the work here on portablefreeware makes those more accessible and (often) more private.
When I advised someone I knew with situation some years ago, I was really proud to make a lot of recommendations about using portable software here on the site to help stay safe. It sounds bizarre but I think this whole PRISM thing is good for the site.