Its not exactly news that the government doesn't have much concern for citizen privacy. And it shouldn't be a surprise that government agencies are doing their best to disrupt and destroy radical communities by using various forms of violence. There was a bit of coverage of the infrastructure in place to enable large scale monitoring via deep packet inspection and calea support in issue 10 of HTZ, and now there is some legal news on the white house trying to extend the power of FBI requests for email usage (who mail is being sent to and when, aka envelope information) as well as url request history from service providers without aproval from a judge. More on this can be found on the Washington Post's coverage of this story here.

Tor can be downloaded from https://torproject.org. The HTTPS Everywhere Plugin (https://https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) for Firefox enables HTTPS surfing on many websites such as Wikipedia, The New York Times, Facebook, and others.