As outlined in the NSA recruitment audio, the term "adversary" includes everyone - not just terrorists. There is nobody who is not considered to be an "adversary", so that includes commercial rivals too.
I thought that language or cultural barriers prevented those companies from succeeding or that those countries suppressed US companies because they are evil and want to control their population.
Today I think I'm more realistic about that. All sides want to control their population (US included), and no one wants foreign countries to access data of their citizens.
That's why there's so much redundancy. China would never allow Facebook to succeed in their market and the US wouldn't allow Sina Weibo, Renren or Vkontakte to succeed on their market.
The US wouldn't ban those companies outright (like China did), but there would be a media campaign against them and the COMMUNIST THREAT that those companies pose to the minds of our innocent children in the west, which basically would have the same effect.
Put your mobile phone permanently in flight mode and go back to relying on landlines/email.
The alternative choice to this is accepting the fact that "GCHQ now wants to turn the mobile web into an all-seeing surveillance machine."
The alternative is most definitely not landlines/email. We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software, including for our mobile phones. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why the mobile web must be a surveillance machine.
I agree 100%. Open source software + hardware + FIRMWARE must be part of any long-term solution. "Long-term" because short-term, governments won't let that happen (they will always work with/help corporations to keep circulating products with backdoors in proprietary/closed-source firmware).
I know much of the reaction to that is going to be cynicism about what is possible there, but I'm pretty sure that cynicism is one of the bigger stumbling blocks.
If you want secure communications, the transport layer (3G, internet, land lines, postal, talking to people) should always be untrusted and cryptography should be used.
However you can only trust one method for the long term which is a pre-shared manual one time pad. Other methods are proven to be somewhat variable in their implementation and ability to remain secure.