My reaction was "chicken little says 'the sky is falling'*"
Keep an eye on what is happening in countries "further ahead" on the
lack-of-privacy and surveillance curves and how internet users in those
countries cope. I'm particularly impressed with Chinese internet users.
Simple lessons:
Evolve faster than the authorities, change what you do and how you do it
frequently. Be an early adopter.
Use in-group private vocabularies, won't be effective against active
infiltration but will slow down an NLP system. ("grass mud horse")
Piggyback on essential services. (China doesn't want to block Google App
Engine, which makes for a proliferation of free App Engine based proxies.)
Decentralize and use official reaction to measure where active surveillance
is occurring.
These are just a few conclusions off the top of my head that I've come to
by watching. Watching how weibo users deal with censorship and surveillance
has been fascinating.
-- Charles
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
