I’ve been mulling over the news of the NSA data-mining operation that’s come to light recently, and wondering whether the grass-roots Internet community will find some way to nullify it. It’s hard to have anything other than vague thoughts about all of this, because I don’t know diddly-squat about the details of how the NSA mechanism works, or how extensive/pervasive it is.

But I can’t help drawing parallels between the NSA system and Google, in terms of the basic objective of finding patterns among vast quantities of independent events. For example, I’m aware that Google takes nearly a month to completely “refresh” its scan of all the URL’s on the Internet; how much more efficient can NSA’s computers be, given the tens of millions of phone calls that must be taking place each day? If it takes, say, a week, then it’s old news by the time NSA figures out that person A called person B, who (three or four degrees of connection further on) called a terrorist in Kabul. On the other hand, maybe they have such awesomely powerful computers that they can do all of this in real time, just as we’re led to believe when we watch the razzle-dazzle, utterly fake, demonstrations of technology on TV shows like 24.

Anyway, now that this news is out in the open, what are we going to do about it? As several commentators have remarked in recent days, the serious, competent terrorists have presumably known about such forms of wiretapping for several years; who knows if they’re still sloppy enough, or lazy enough, that they create situations for the NSA and other spooks to observe them?

At the other end of the spectrum is the average citizen, like me. Even though I’m generally unhappy, and vaguely worried, about the implications of this massive data-mining operation, I’m too lazy (or busy, depending on your perspective) to do anything about it. I make a dozen calls a day to various friends, clients, business associates, and family members; and I have little or no idea who they might be calling, or who the recipients of their phone calls might be calling. I would be pretty surprised if there’s actually a six-degrees connection between me and Osama, but it’s certainly not impossible.

For those who do have the time to do something about all of this (e.g., college students, computer programmers with no social life, hackers, mischievous teenagers, and amateur wannabe terrorists around the world), what could they consider doing to throw a monkey wrench into the NSA mechanism? How about something equivalent to “google-bombing”? Let’s all make phone calls to our third-cousin in Afghanistan, and watch NSA go crazy with a chain of 100,000 people whose third-degree connections end up in Osama’s cave. Or maybe some mischievous college kid can figure out a way to hack into AT&T’s computer systems, to make it appear that every single Wal-Mart employee has been direct-dialing phone numbers in downtown Teheran. Or maybe … well, I’d better stop before I suggest anything really mischievous, or I might find myself subjected to extreme rendition, and awaken in some dungeon in downtown Baghdad tomorrow.

Maybe nothing will come of all of this. But I do think the whole NSA story is symptomatic of a huge power struggle that’s now underway: the “top-down” powers of government, with their huge supercomputers, doing their best to monitor — and, ultimately, control — a massive population of technology-enabled citizens. For the most part, that population has been fairly passive and oblivious; but if they wake up, and if they get really pissed off, I think we’ll find that their collective computer power outweighs all the supercomputers that NSA, CIA, and every other government agency on earth.