The surveillance state wants to track your every move. It aims to have access to all information and because it has sickened the society on which we all depend, it's dangerous to us all.
I call it The Mold.
It seems to fit. Mold spreads far and wide with spores and with tendrils and grows wherever it can. It saps energy from everything. In the information age The Mold innovates at amazing speed. Whatever Snowden shared is probably obsolete by now.
To get free from The Mold, we need to create clean rooms, spaces where it can't grow because there's nothing for it. An encrypted file is a clean room with privacy made possible by software and cryptography. Tails is another kind of clean room.
Privacy lets you gather and process information out of the reach of The Mold. Privacy provides the ability to act and think and meet in ways the surveillance state doesn't like.
Anonymity is what you need to share your findings.
Both take work to attain. Each has immense value.
Why are they important? Because the world has a bad case of The Mold. The symptoms are becoming undeniable. Feedback loops have been broken, due process is corrupt, checks and balances aren't working. The Mold is there too.
We must use our clean rooms to gather evidence and make it available so that scientific principles can operate.
Only through privacy and anonymity can we escape The Mold and regain freedom.