Questions raised by Little Brother

Little Brother made me, at least, ask the difficult question of what level of government surveillance is appropriate.  Marcus takes a pretty hard "no surveillance" stance, but we're all getting pretty close to 25 and probably shouldn't be trusted.  It seems to me that there's an appropriate level.  Far below what's going on in this story, of course.  Wiretapping known criminals after getting a warrant in order to catch their contacts seems like a good idea.  Wiretapping everyone in the country without needing a warrant is obviously too far. Where do we draw that line?

The other question, of course, is how much of this Internet privacy stuff have you looked into already?  "ParanoidLinux" and "Xnet" don't exist, but Tor very much does.  So does a very speculative plan called project meshnet (meshnet on reddit and a wiki), which involves creating a distributed communications network that would not be controlled by any central authority.  So if you read this story and started getting paranoid, there's software and communities out there for you to look for.