What you can do: 1. Support the EFF, CDT and other orgs that work on technology and civil liberties. 2. For truly private data and activity get religion with PGP, TrueCrypt, Tor and other tools. For the non-private stuff, take some sensible measures (see below) 3. Consider sandboxing/compartmentalizing your online activity across disparate ids, browsers, machines, phones and locations. Definitely run Ad Blockers/Filters. 4. Stay current with EFF/CDT and related twitter feeds. There will be another privacy debate at a policy level. Get educated, push for the good guys.

Here's an overview resource: http://amzn.to/etLNze

Mark was given an award by the EFF a couple of years ago for his bravery.

There's a rich history of research into the nature and methods of problem solving (Polya et. al), the role of unconscious (e.g. walk away from the lab/tools) and so on. The more intractable the problem, the more it required being able to walk away from the tools (see anecdotal history about discovery of the structure of benzene for example).

The experience of "coding", with its quick feedback loop hypnotizes people into an unproductive leash. The nature of the problem, the language and tools either help or exacerbate.

My experience is that most hard problem solving needs at least three approaches - I paraphrase them as 1. Zoom Out, 2. Zoom In 3. Zoom away. Debuggers aside, I found that program construction in interpreted languages (my work was in Lisp) supported with a good toolset and modularity in design, allowed productive zoom-in, zoom-out whereas programming in "edit/compile/debug" languages even with the toolset and modularity required "zooming away" more often. Could be that the context switching cycle of edit/compile/debug is a cognitive tax that really hampers hard problem solving or when things are not working as expected.