Your only safety lies in being overlooked, that is to say, in not being part of an affinity group of interest to the Obama administration. Otherwise you become part of the result set of a query, or search pattern. The reason everyone must sooner or later fall into the toils of the data mining operation is something called Dunbar’s Number. It holds that no cell can grow beyond 150 members in size without resorting to communications and hierarchies.
So unless your organization wants to doom itself to insignificance, you will use email. You will use cloud apps. You will use IM. And you will wind up on the administration’s database.
The fact that you belong to a large group, for example the 50% of the US population that is conservative or Republican, does not give you safety in numbers. Within this large group of millions are a much smaller number of key leadership nodes. They are the nodes that matter, the top of the hierarchy mandated by Dunbar’s Number.
If you can control, corrupt or even bait those nodes you can reduce the entire group to impotence. You can effectively decapitate it, a strategy applied not only to al-Qaeda but apparently also by the IRS in its hunt of Tea Party and Republican fundraising groups. The virtual world let’s you dominate the virtual high ground. You don’t have to clobber all Muslims and Republicans. You just have to clobber the key nodes and the rest will mill around like leaderless ants.
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