Consensus decision making has hamstrung progressive causes since the 70s (http://berkeleyjournal.org/2015/05/the-theology-of-consensus...), predating the technological toolkit which nominally justified not having a targetable leadership.
It is right, fitting, and appropriate to consider how governments abuse technology. One the other hand, to descend into a fearful state about data making it "a lot easier to discredit and disrupt political activists" is both unbalanced and fundamentally disrespectful to our forebearers who faced lynching, Pinkerton detectives, the Raj's army, etc.
> 70s
Yes, I'm familiar with history. This is somewhat off topic.
> unbalanced
Insults? Really?
> fundamentally disrespectful
I never made the comparison to lynchings/etc. If anything, modern technology has made these tactics safer. Really, this was my point - you are thinking about tactics as they were used decades ago. You might want to actually read those JTRIG links, as they describe a very different sort of tactic.
Technology has made it a lot easier to discredit and disrupt political activists. An obvious example of how to map relationships to find potential organizers that might bring together a larger political movement is the NSA programs COTRAVELER[2], but the methods are not that different from "targeted advertising" or any Facebook-style social network.
Occupy terrified a lot of people in power specifically because it didn't have an obvious minimum spanning tree to target.
We even have documents from Snowden about GCHQ's version[3]. JTRIG even has a wide assortment of tools[4] available for disrupting and discrediting their targets. Their tool for "amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)" doesn't seem particularly useful for national defense or catching terrorists - they have other tools for feeding a specific target false information. On the other hand, amplifying the popularity of a video would be very useful for propaganda.
Obviously very little of this is proof. It was already frightening what J. Edgar Hoover was able to do decades ago. How would the same thing be done with the benefit of modern technology? Would you even notice it?[5]
A even better question might be: given how eagerly the advertising industry used tracking technology and data mining, would you consider it likely that a government agency with little restraint or oversight would refrain from doing the same thing?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/how-the-nsa...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
[4] https://www.schneier.com/gchq-catalog.html
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRzYJullFOs (14 seconds of Max Headroom)