> but what your desktop runs these days is less and less important.

Not if you care about US government backdoors.

The trend is that everything important goes to the cloud, where people add and access data from all their devices including PCs, tablets and phones. What's running on your desktop is not really important, when the cloud providers have access to it because it their servers, not yours and governments just happen to either scoop up the traffic or have special access to it.

What's more private, a Word document sitting only on your drive on Windows, or the same information in a Google Doc that you uploaded from a hardened Linux machine over TOR? In that sense, what the desktop runs is becoming less important. In the first case, your file is unlikely to be accessed unless you're a person of significant interest to a government and takes some effort. In the second case, as it was revealed, it's almost routinely scanned or can be accessed with the click of a few buttons. A super secure USB booted secured PC running OpenBSD is not going to help you once the document reaches the internet/cloud.

What happens if the cloud service closes? Cloud services have some risks too: http://www.followsteph.com/2012/04/19/what-are-the-risks-of-... This is especially true for a government entity.

Thank you, exactly.

And it turns out that most of the interesting and useful stuff is by its nature in the network - who I called, what cell tower took the call at what time, who was on the cell tower at the same time, who I emailed, bought a Starbucks afterwards in the queue.

The document named "My evil plan for world domination" on my hard drive is far less a signifier for my future actions than all the metadata already out there.

It is a form of pollution as Schneier says