hmm, do you live in a city? I have seen dogs bite a porcupine, in fact the same dog multiple porcupines, and our porcupines have barbed quills, unlike your friendly little hedgehogs. I don't think that was a very apt simile, even though the dog does whimper and yowl a lot while you pull the quills out of their nose with a pliers.
On the actual point of your post, exactly what pointy fur am I gonna grow? Exactly how does my using GPG do actual damage to the government dogs when they do bite me? The principle behind a hedgehog's defence is that it hurts the offender, how do I do that to the government? Are you advocating some kind of militant response?
The fact is that when we have to preemptively encrypt all our personal email because we know it is being intercepted, as opposed to sometimes encrypting sensitive emails in case it gets misdirected, then the mental/emotional damage PJ is talking about in TFA has already occurred. We have already been deprived of the concept of personal privacy, we are already in Auschwitz with Primo Levi.
Whether the government actually is intercepting all our email or not no longer matters. It is no longer just the preppers and the tinfoil hat types that see the NSA behind every door, it is now a significant percentage of the unwashed masses.
At this point what intelligent person would actually believe the government if the were to come clean, admit what they had done in the past and give us transparent oversight into what they are doing now?
Based on history most of us would immediately assume there is yet another three letter acronym behind the NSA, with even quieter black helicopters, that has been pulling the strings all along, and will continue to do so unseen by us.
It is much like what Asimov did with his foundation series after the first three, there is always a darker more hidden organization behind the ones we uncover, and they are always better manipulators than the ones before. We are just discovering psychohistory, but in reality a hidden group has been steering all of human civilization for thousands of years, and yeah, they are robots.
This rant went a little over the top, but I am thinking of all the stuff I did as a kid that my children will never be able to do, and it pisses me off.