Instead of the government mandating some Orwellian telescreen that nefariously records everything you write, or a national registry that lists who your friends are, where you went to school, and where you log in from, we built schemes that would record everything anyway for other purposes, like facebook and gmail, and then handed the keys over. Evgeny Morozov pointed this out when he mentioned that the KGB used to torture people for this information. But we've voluntarily built and submitted to it!
I don't dispute the need for surveillance, so what can be done? The best I can think of is a throwback to Bill Gates' emphasis on measurement. Transparency is important precisely because if you can't observe something, you don't have any clue what it is.
I know this sounds too political, but the very systems we're worried about are ones that several people who frequent this place helped build, for different purposes. There's no way to know exactly how something you build will be used, but there is a way to monitor it, and that requires transparency almost by definition.