What even is the point of the seasons , storywise ? They seem to serve no purpose in the plot and generally make the story a lot less believable . <| sep |> I would argue that we are no more free today than 10 years ago . Rather , we are less free . The internet was hard for the government to get a handle on but they are learning and they are persistent . The technology is also making it more feasible over time . Yes they are learning , but also VPN is becoming ubiquitous , TOR was in it ' s infant stages 10 years ago at 4 years old . Poisoning the well software is propping up you can poison your google searches for example quite trivially And when it is mass produced it becomes subject to big government . Right now , they don ' t put in too much draconian stuff but that ' s because they don ' t want to scare the populace . The elite are predators stalking their prey ever so slowly inching closer . And as witnessed by the DDWRT , people will create their own firmware bypassing whatever surveillance if there is incentive to do so DDWRT was not created for this purpose . Firmware rootkits do get r e v e a l e d b a c k d o o r r ootkitfoundpreinstalledon 3 millionandroidphones etc . it is a cat and mouse game . These things often cannot be kept secret forever . The government really doesn ' t need to see the internals of a network freenet and other closed networks excepted to deanonymize traffic . They need only look at the end point and starting point with advanced analytics software . This is software that is relatively recent and only getting better . By obfuscation I meant steganography over IP . In either case , this is all much less convenient than the open internet and requires periless precaution by users all of which can be subverted by cracking down on the tech or long term record keeping with automatic analysis software or simple OShardware level intrusion on private machines . For VPN the start point would be your local computernetwork , and end point the VPN provider . So to get clear text traffic , you need to root either one of these . By simple traffic analysis the VPN provider mixes in a lot of connections , but granted , not very many requests probably end up exactly the same time with exactly same packet size in both sides . However , for VPN provider it is quite a trivial matter to add fake traffic , or to route the traffic additionally through TOR . Assuming Hop 1 at User ISP is compromised , and Hop 1 for VPN provider connectivity top of the rack switch If general purpose surveillance you don ' t need User ISP router compromised not specifically targeting . Traffic comes to VPN provider encrypted , leaves out unencrypted if clear text or HTTPS . I don ' t trust , trust based systems , so yes it can be monitored . However , if VPN provider routes to TOR the data leaves encrypted ones again . Add noise to the system and all of sudden the analysis becomes rather expensive . If just user ISP is compromised , encrypt all the things , add some noise . It becomes a cost game . How many routers and switches they would need to compromise to actually always get both ends ? This is a 251 billion euro m a r k e t r e v e n u e f r o m t e lecommunicationsequipment annually . All of the gear needs to be replaced to monitor all of them . It is a Zettabyte scale i s s u e p r o v i d e r v i s u a l n e t w o r k i n g i n d e x vnivnihyperconnectivitywp . html . Thing is if the switches routers are compromised for goverments or any parties , they are compromised period . It ' s only matter of time everyone has access . So they need to be physically compromised , not by firmware , but by planting gear physically at the site and doing port mirroring . Oops , that got just super expensive ! So they will try to get ISPs to pay for that Super outrage from ISPs , all prices increase tremendously Super outrage from consumers .