If you're a dissident, you should assume that your electronic communications are being monitored. Depending on what sort of dissident you are, you may also have to assume that your garbage is being monitored. And your mail opened. And your home searched while you're out. (If you're at the point where your home is being searched while you're in it, then it's normally too late to worry about information warfare.)

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Well, yes, I am mostly thinking about this in terms of corporate security. The NSA is not spending billions on reading dissidents mail, because dissidents can be shouted down just fine by the noise machine manufacturing consent 24/7/365
NSA is about stealing intellectual property. The KGB spent an absurd amount of effort on industrial espionage.

 I estimate that the odds that the other declining empire is into that game up to it's eyeballs at nigh-unity.

Which also explains why there is so much money flowing into US politics, and why the economy is so crappy.  - The market economy isn't - the game is being rigged in the favor of whoever is paying the biggest bribes.

The best solution to this would be radical openness. Tear up the intellectual property treaties, close the patent offices, void the IPs on everything, and run corporate governance with open books and open board meetings. This seems a bit unlikely to be implemented, so as a second best solution, it might be worth while to prevent the NSA from just giving boeing the blueprints for anything they want. Not that they seem to be profiting much from what they are stealing...