I am slightly bothered by the notion that "blending in" has any chance of working in the modern era.<p>Certainly, in the past, the entity carrying out the surveillance was likely to have a limited budget of time-and-attention, a limitation that could be gamed to evade analysis and pursuit as described.<p>However, computerisation and data analytics change the game significantly. The cost of "attention" is reduced to such a significant extent that practically everybody's behaviour can be analysed, albeit superficially.<p>It is a relatively trivial matter for the entity carrying out the surveillance to build a dossier on large swathes of the population: to identify and categorise their beliefs, their behaviours and their weaknesses. To score them according to how much of a threat they represent, or according to whatever other factors may be useful.<p>The information-dominance landscape has shifted considerably over the past 10 years. I am greatly interested in seeing how our newfound industrial-scale-information-dominance is translated into real-world power: Presumably also by automated means and on an industrial scale.<p>I imagine that this can be done subtly, by targeting specific influencers, inhibiting some selected communications and inserting or promoting others, thereby shaping discourse and the formation of political belief in a larger section of the population.<p>Emerging geopolitical crises (Ukraine/Crimea, anyone?) provide an ideal petri-dish to see if the competing factions are deploying this sort of technology, and for assessing the effectiveness of these techniques.