Actually, this is part of what’s bothering me. I’ve been told in the past that the Stasi, and other secret police that engaged in mass surveillance, ended up gathering enormous amounts of information – so much that they couldn’t analyze it in any meaningful way.
I’m worried that many activists are wasting enormous amounts of time and energy worrying about possible surveillance, and trying to counter it with hard-to-use anonymity and encryption software, and that this ends up isolating activists and inhibiting political movements.
In fact, I wonder if that’s the real point of what the NSA is doing. Do you remember Total Information Awareness, and the IAO’s cartoonishly threatening logo? At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder if they were just driving trollies us. Maybe that is what’s going on.
