Someone called "Lightages" just posted a thread titled "Anynoe else want to burn down Chanel HQ?".
In the UK you can be arrested and prosecuted for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Joke_Trial
Every action that makes mass surveillance harder is an important step to protecting our freedom.
There is arguably good reason for that. You forget that, often, if it is against some law somewhere, there's a valid reason for it to be so. If you were the agency in charge of keeping your country's residents safe (at whatever level -- be that local law enforcement, or national security), your job is to sort through those BS posts on forums to differentiate between the dumb-**** that threatens individuals or entities as a joke, and the ones that are one snide comment away from strapping on percussive clothing.
I really don't know where I stand on the whole "should they be able to see what I do?" debate. On one hand, I don't really want everything I do to be subject to scrutiny at the whims of some man in black. OTOH, I also like not having my home attacked by terrorists. So.... there's gotta be some give and take there. Warrants are nice in theory, but there are no shortage of books, TV shows, movies, etc., where you see someone caught in red tape and the "bad guy" gets away. Real life is just not that clean and neat, and sometimes it gets tough to differentiate between good and evil. Some have called for large-scale discussion on this topic, and I think it's high time people were more aware of the reality. Surveillance isn't new, it's just a little more high-profile now. Not much has changed but the public's awareness of what's going on.
On the topic of ISPs being invasive chodes, well... you likely have anywhere from 30 to 100 ways per month to indicate your distaste for that practice. I have worked for two ISPs now. Once, we instituted a ban on outgoing SMTP unless you owned a static IP. The intention was to prevent the unintended distribution of spam from all the many, many, many zombified clients we had. Several of our customers let us know what they thought of that policy, and management was forced to consider the opposing viewpoint. At my last gig, we didn't filter, period. Having worked alongside a lot of techs, I can tell you, we as a general rule have absolutely no ambition to snoop on or molest your data -- and are usually opposed to any such suggestion. If your ISP does otherwise, call them up, cancel your account, and tell the operator precisely why you're leaving when they ask. Encryption is the wrong solution to that problem.