My solution is the same as yours, Jack. I avoid surveillance by being uninteresting and by avoiding unlawful behavior.

I also don't own a cellphone...yet (I still might get one someday, just for possible road emergencies). And my emails to people are quite uncontroversial.

So who is watching me? Four budgies are watching me. They depend on me for their food and water, and I think they're also starting to like me fairly well. At any rate, I have their undivided attention whenever I approach the cage.

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I do think, though, that the increasing levels of surveillance of the general public in the UK and the USA and elsewhere are worrisome. In the event of a war or some other national emergency, that surveillance could theoretically be used in all kinds of ways that violate people's traditional civil liberties...and there is no guarantee that our governments would not do that in what they regarded as an emergency. The recent Patriot Act and the NDAA legislation in the USA have already put the legal mechanisms in place which could be used to establish what would amount to an authoritarian system of the worst kind.

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My budgies don't worry about stuff like that. I don't worry about it much either, because worrying won't help me, it'll only stress me out.