[puts tinfoil hat back on]
Well, that'll help with the spying: http://slashdot.org/story/05/11/10/1839224/aluminum-foil-hats-will-not-stop-them
And that's with oversight and real-time news reporting. Can you imagine the havoc we'll create when politicians and the media are 220 million light years away?
Are you kidding? Half of that havoc was because of the media coverage making soldiers want to show off and look tough, and politicians sending screwed up orders based on their personal (and highly uninformed) biases. (The other half was just because that's what "organized" militaries do. The unorganized ones are even worse.) That's okay though, any exploratory/colonial/invasion force sent out by earth will likely carry politicans and media with it to turn things into a messed up circus as well.
Why are we assuming a cataclysm? Yes, there may be one, and we have to prepare for the worst
That's why. This isn't a discussion about "sharing things with people now" - the internet does that quite well. It's a discussion of "what/how do we share information with future people after a hypothetical cataclysm, to get civilization back on track".
but we should also make as much available via technology as well. A thousand copies of an encyclopedia on thumb drives perhaps?
That would be of no use to an immediately post-cataclysm society, since they wouldn't be able to read them, and of no use to immediate society since they already have it. Also, by the time they'd developed (all on their own) the technology to read them, the 5-10 year average lifetime for data on thumb drives would have long since passed many times over, and the data would be gone.
Just don't use ROHS-compliant electronics; the lack of lead in the solder joints would whisker them to death over time.
The lack of long-term viability of magnetic storage would destroy the data long before the solder joints became an issue.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.