Naturally. If all communication and all transactions are electronic, they will be stored and indexed. First, this happens in corporations and other organization

Naturally. If all communication and all transactions are electronic, they will be stored and indexed. First, this happens in corporations and other organizations. Since this knowledge is power, the state can't let this go on for very long, and it will demand access to this data. This process is in full swing in Europe with things like the Data Retention Directive and various Echelon clones. The people can't let the state have all this power, since it's an absurd power advantage which people are rightly afraid leads to an Orwellian society. They will protest with things like the Pirate Party. There is another way of undermining this information advantage, however, which is to disclose information instead of trying to hide it from certain entities. If you tell everyone what you do, you can't be blackmailed, for instance. In my view, things like Facebook and Twitter are symptoms of this. When my mom goes on about why people broadcast what they had for breakfast, I usually tell her that they are subverting the power. Zuckerberg, Schmidt and Assange have understood this and are acting and speaking accordingly. The only other way forward, in my view, is ubiquitous end-to-end encryption between individuals. I'm not so sure that would be a good thing, and I don't see how it could work if the current trend of communication and transactions being concentrated in fewer and fewer hubs will continue, since that means someone has access to at least timestamp and communicating parties. If we can reverse that and decentralize, encryption between "power symmetric" parties might work. But then, it might not be necessary.