Oh, and your closest allies will be marginalized, smelly and opinionated; and on the lam.

Genuine question, do you actually believe this, or are you referring to it as fiction in the same way the Matrix is fictional?

I do think that our government took a serious wrong turn after 9/11, and that our collective self-image ("beacon of democracy" and all that jazz) is increasingly at odds with our behavior. More and more the US government seems to be driven by non-human motives. Non-human in that even the people at the very top seem cognitively overwhelmed and more as if they were being acted upon by unseen forces whose existence can be inferred by the traces they leave behind; but whose intent and motivation are obscure.

You changing your mind is irrelevant to global agenda and the way things will be executed. Most people "change" their mind by stopping to vote for one party (D) and changing to another (R). Example of spying on its citizens is a great example when your change of choice does not make a dent; it is President Bush (R) who signed Patroit Act/NSA spying into law, its is then President Obama (D) who said he will stop this only to continue and expand while elected. And people have short memory so now they will vote again on R. Nothing will change at the end and you can be sure those who come in place with continue or extend the abuse up to the point when system entirely collapse.

Or the 20% of the population of the _US_ that don't use the internet.

You can even still use a cell phone, if you want - just buy a prepaid mobile with cash.

And aside from awkwardness with your friends, you might even find such a life quite livable. You'll experience no material hardship.

Actually this is exactly the kind of thing this data would sniff out. It would capture whichever cell towers you interact with (home, work, etc) and paired with data from your friends & their call logs could easily pinpoint who you are. Kind of amazing from an analytical standpoint but pretty scary for privacy.

Do not appear on any camera/picture.

Do not purchase anything with any kind of card.

Do not drive a car (License plate recognition systems are getting scary.)

Etc...

You sound like a person who hasn't moved a long distance from their family.

Also, you can't use a cellphone without them knowing who you are with high certainty. It only takes 3 points of location data to identify a person the vast majority of the time[1]. Using a cell phone that you paid for with cash is insufficient.

[1] http://www.livescience.com/28353-anonymous-phone-data-not-an...

What that has to do with anything, god only knows, unless you meant something like '100 miles away from the border', and even then I'm at a loss.

Go visit a flyover state sometime. Most of the country's very different than SV/the northeast corridor/other modern urbanized area, and I wouldn't live there if you paid me.

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-constitution-free-zone...

Not necessarily right, but that's how I go there.

So actually 19%, yes.

One of the biggest is the destruction of creativity. When people know that their actions are under constant surveillance it creates an enormous cognitive load. They have to constantly evaluate everything they do as to how it might appear to a critical observer. The end result is that people will simply stop doing anything that might have a social risk associated with it.

A panopticon society will be a dull, stagnant and repressed society. Think of every little backwards town where everybody knows everybody's business and anyone who steps out of line is ostracized. That is what our entire society will turn into with total surveillance.

and i don't think anyone claims it wouldn't be a different culture, or that we should throw away core privacy like being able to sleep in our own beds without someone watching

That's basically Brin's theory and it is a bad one because it assumes, against all evidence to the contrary, that people will just simply stop looking for ways to judge other people as being inferior.

It is a misunderstanding that it is the communication infrastructure and technology under attack here. It is not.

It is the abstract idea of Freedom that is under attack, and so a technology based solution is not the answer. More than powerful technology, we need powerful new ideas about Freedom.

New technology implementations that fix existing attack vectors would still be most welcome, but not a cure all.

Communication intercepts may have, but wiretaps haven't existed longer than communication by wire.