Your fourth point is the most scary in my opinion. I just realized that it doesn't take much in terms of effort to achieve almost perfect secrecy. A simple dro

Your fourth point is the most scary in my opinion. I just realized that it doesn't take much in terms of effort to achieve almost perfect secrecy. A simple dropbox account coupled with TOR or another similar service is enough for the online and 'cover your tracks'. You could plainly download truecrypt and encrypt your data with it and any group who's monitoring you would be none the wiser. Sure, they'd know you've sent something and they could break into your house to seize your computer but you either have truecrypted your hard drive previously or DBAN'ed your computer. You could say that this is not a good thing because it allows someone to sell secrets to opposing countries. You would say that the tubes need to be monitored, secure connections need to have a back door, every bit passing through the pipe needs to be copied for future analysis. But let me ask you this, if you were living in an oppressive country do you still think it's 'better' to let everyone know what you're doing? In a sense, you could say that the advent of high-speed, low cost, easily accessible and network communicable adding machines has made it easier for the general to be more informed and less 'spyable'(of course, less spyable only if you take the extra effort, but I assure you it's possible, although the laws of diminishing returns apply).