Keep in mind too, that "encrypt everything" only solves part of the "problem" of communications surveillance.
If the apparently-not-april-fools-gag reports out of the UK [1] over the weekend are to be believed, police agencies are deciding amongst themselves that the time/date/length/frequency/endpoints of any internet communication are things that they don't need warrants or oversight for.
Encrypting the _contents_ of your email/texts/phonecalls/websitevisits still gives them access to the social graph in which you're communicating.
Suppose one of your "brogrammer" colleaues sends out email to a group of recipients every Friday afternoon, one to you with some regular work-related business, and a dozen to his 'bros'. You send your usual response, and so do his bros, then he texts a particular number, gets a call back from that number. When that number becomes part of an investigation and turns out ,say, to be a cocaine dealers "burner phone" - guess what _you_ just started to look like part of? And if you've got some hacktivist-motivated software in place to strongly encrypt the mail between you and your coworker, how do you think _that's_ going to look to the investigators? (feel free to invent your own bad scenario about the "war on terror" or the "saving children from pedophiles" or the "occupy movement" or "overzealous corporate IP enforcement" instead of the "war on drugs")
I don't know how to solve that - but some TOR-like multi-juristiction-distributed email/text/IM routing mechanism, where the source/destination information is part of the encrypted payload so "they" only get to see the hop between you and your nearest node, along with (crypographically) randomised message forwarding delays, payload padding, and "bogus messages" to mitigate traffic analysis (the first to stop someone noticing "Alice sent a message into node 1 and Bob simultaneously received a message from node 2", the second prevents leaks like "Alice sent a 13.2k message into node 1, and Bob received a 13.2k message from node 2", and the third to solve "Alice sent 8 messages into node 1 and Bob received 8 messages from node 2")
>some TOR-like multi-juristiction-distributed email/text/IM routing mechanism, where the source/destination information is part of the encrypted payload so "they" only get to see the hop between you and your nearest node, along with (crypographically) randomised message forwarding delays, payload padding, and "bogus messages" to mitigate traffic analysis
If the apparently-not-april-fools-gag reports out of the UK [1] over the weekend are to be believed, police agencies are deciding amongst themselves that the time/date/length/frequency/endpoints of any internet communication are things that they don't need warrants or oversight for.
Encrypting the _contents_ of your email/texts/phonecalls/websitevisits still gives them access to the social graph in which you're communicating.
Suppose one of your "brogrammer" colleaues sends out email to a group of recipients every Friday afternoon, one to you with some regular work-related business, and a dozen to his 'bros'. You send your usual response, and so do his bros, then he texts a particular number, gets a call back from that number. When that number becomes part of an investigation and turns out ,say, to be a cocaine dealers "burner phone" - guess what _you_ just started to look like part of? And if you've got some hacktivist-motivated software in place to strongly encrypt the mail between you and your coworker, how do you think _that's_ going to look to the investigators? (feel free to invent your own bad scenario about the "war on terror" or the "saving children from pedophiles" or the "occupy movement" or "overzealous corporate IP enforcement" instead of the "war on drugs")
I don't know how to solve that - but some TOR-like multi-juristiction-distributed email/text/IM routing mechanism, where the source/destination information is part of the encrypted payload so "they" only get to see the hop between you and your nearest node, along with (crypographically) randomised message forwarding delays, payload padding, and "bogus messages" to mitigate traffic analysis (the first to stop someone noticing "Alice sent a message into node 1 and Bob simultaneously received a message from node 2", the second prevents leaks like "Alice sent a 13.2k message into node 1, and Bob received a 13.2k message from node 2", and the third to solve "Alice sent 8 messages into node 1 and Bob received 8 messages from node 2")
[1] http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/u-k-gov-t-set...