Honestly, if the NSA wanted to know what Stallman was up to, they'd apply the $5 wrench technique (http://xkcd.com/538/). All the tin-foil in the world can't prevent them from getting what they want if you're suddenly a Person of Interest.
You're completely missing the point -- it's unfeasible, unpractical, and unproductive hitting millions of people on the head with $5 wrenches. This is the entire point -- they can do it easily with everyone now, they're not hitting people with wrenches -- that would invoke suspicion and retaliatory response that would curtail their legal powers to snoop around.
Maybe you're forgetting about the sorts of things that went on, are probably still going on, in various brutal military dictatorships around the world. Wrenches are just the start of what they do to people before they disappear them.
It isn't impossible to beat information out of millions of people. It's been done before and it'll be done again.
You say it'd invoke suspicion, but it wouldn't. If you're at the wrench phase of interrogation, you're already in a world where legal powers don't matter.
>Maybe you're forgetting about the sorts of things that went on, are probably still going on, in various brutal military dictatorships around the world
Is there no difference between specifically targeting a suspect and gaining physical access to their hardware vs. any number of government employees/contractors sitting at their desk browsing through anybody's data with little to no technical limits and little to no oversight?
One of the slides literally says that users must be careful to and their query with another parameter to avoid running afoul of the law.
At this point the only difference is cost and scale. What the NSA is doing needs to be reeled in big-time, probably even shut down completely, but that doesn't mean being all tin-foil hat will somehow make you immune to what they're doing.
I'm sure they know everything they need to know about Stallman, just as they do about everyone else, apparently. Unless he's sitting in a cave writing EMACS source on goat hides, they'll have a window into his activities.
> At this point the only difference is cost and scale.
Only if we are talking about the same types of attack, which we aren't. If you do "wrench" style targeted attacks at a large scale, you'll leave 10%+ of the population injured, how is that supposed to work out for a government?
Stallman's counter-measures probably work as long as only very few people use them. The same is probably true for terrorists, which is why this whole dragnet surveillance does not really work towards the stated goals and "crackpots" like me suspect it may have more to do with bullying people into self-censorship.
NSA spying is not designed for the individual. It's designed for the masses. It's to keep the populace in check. It's Century of the Self and Edward Bernays, except for the 21st century.
