700000 / 125788578 = 0.0056 = 0.56% -- FTFY Such percentage of a nation's population individually isolating itself seems noteworthy and possibly even significant enough to be considered an epidemic. Honestly, anything that directly negatively effects 700,000 people is pretty serious, even compared to the entire world population. I do agree that there is a possibility of similar (correctly calculated) proportions in other countries.

I wonder what would happen if there was another Church Committee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

The NSA has been monitoring HAM radio since at least the 1970's. Here's a mention of this from yesterday: http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/crisis-fear-have-driven-us-national-security-state. I suppose you could speak in code, but it is unlikely that they would be unable to break a code that a human could speak and understand. They can probably at least tell which repeater or autopatch you are near. And whether they can track you down or not, it is conceivable that your verbal communications would be processed into something understandable more rapidly than an AES-256 message.