I fucking hate everything about the way the world is trending. We need a proper grassroots revolution which throws these idiot ministers in prison for crimes against humanity.
In a world of total digital surveillance, steganography and traditional cloak and dagger spycraft become relatively more useful.
While steganography usually refers to the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video, it can be extended to the practice of hiding information in plain sight. An example is encoding a message into what passes for street graffitti. Or laying out rocks in a formation that only a drone or satellite can make sense of.
One of the smartest people I've ever met explained to me that more or less all digital communications are compromised if the resources of a nation-state are aligned against you and that the only practical solution for private and secure messages is hiding information in plain sight.
Benevolent AIs may be an outside possibility. Otherwise, short of nuking ourselves back to the stone age, I think total surveillance societies are here to stay.
So it will just happen again. (Meet the new boss, same as the old... Animal farm etc) without all of them being dismantled too. And revolutions of that scale rarely work out well for anyone in the short term.
Cash can mostly be tracked unless you just trade with black/grey market sellers. Adding RFID to notes and mandating readers on cash registers would already be feasible.
Home devices (TVs, DVRs, even fridges[1]) increasingly have microphones and other sensors, so it'll be hard to be sure you're not being recorded even when talking to friends in their living room.
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a24616/sa...
We could at least convert them into total sousveillance societies. If regular citizens can't have privacy, nobody should have privacy.