As a complimentary perspective:<p>For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s</a><p>Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonderful example of this stupidity a guy just before Tiananmen [Square] anniversary a guy was an English professor in Beijing was flirting with a lady in London, and since they were both educated he used a wonderful quote from Shakespeare, because you know in Elizabethan England the word "protest" meant also "I publicly declare" and he quoted to her "I protest my love to you" chop-chop and the conversation was cut short because the word "protest" was prohibited because of associations with Tiananmen, what I find so ridiculous is that if the guy were to be extremely vulgar and told the lady something like "I will fuck your brain out" everything would be okay, you quote Shakespeare... You know computers just give you immense amounts of data and you can play with it."<p>Errors and omissions intentional as I'm directly transcribing Žižek talking.<p>He then goes on to relate an experience as a young adult in Slovenia meeting with his friends and upon parting, knowing everything was recorded, they didn't hind anything and at the end of the conversation they would say something like "Mother baked a good apple pie" and then later found out this really confused the people monitoring their conversations.