As negative as the press may seem from this little corner of the internet, I don't think the issue of NSA surveillance has made much of a ripple in the U.S. yet. The turnout for protests on the fourth was abysmal. People are still using Facebook and Gmail as if nothing has happened. Snowden only remains in the news because he is still free. If he had turned himself in on day 1 he'd have disappeared into some black judicial hole and the story he broke would now be long forgotten instead of merely ignored. If I were Snowden, I'd be seriously wondering if U.S. citizens are worth the trouble.
> People are still using Facebook and Gmail as if nothing has happened.
Personally, I'm still using Facebook and Gmail because I really do have nothing to hide. †
† ...that I wasn't already routing over Tor, encrypting/signing with GPG et al, leaving the low-to-medium risk activity on the public net as a decoy. But I suspect a lot of people do think this without needing the proviso. These are the same people that compete to participate in reality TV shows like Big Brother, after all.
Tor exit nodes (and the commandeering thereof) are only relevant when you're accessing a public net website through Tor; not when accessing a Tor hidden service. If you can keep your activity entirely within the Tor "system" (basically, if your counterparties have foreknowledge to contact you over something like Tormail, rather than you having to "come to them" on a public site) then you'll be protected pretty completely.
...though, if it's something you actually care about, making that Tor connection from an internet cafe in a distant city can't hurt.
I think a better approach than tor that we'll see in the next few years will be a readOnly private "tor" box that you can hide on any network with open wifi. The Raspberry Pi is the perfect platform for this.
Such a box would be running tor and only visible on the Tor network. You'd SSH into it over for and then have your own private exit node.
All you need to do is drop a couple of these in places where there is power you can piggyback off and a wifi signal you can piggyback off or a network you can patch into.
Maybe people care but not enough to go protest on foot? Plus if you start looking at the shades of grey from the nuance (namely all the rules that come into play when using the info), it's harder to get mad if you're pragmatic.
