"Cloud computing" is a newly invented name for an old method where you store all your data on someone else's servers. This is the worst possible solution for anyone who values privacy. Also, those servers (there are just a few) can be ordered offline at any time, and then you have nothing.
For example, imagine that you use Google Groups for general discussion, Google Mail for direct communication and Google Documents for specific papers. All your data is on Google's servers, you have no locally saved copies (usually.) Now Google is offline, or your account is disabled (all of that happened several times already.) You are in trouble, isolated from your contacts and robbed of all your documents and messages.
An opposite example is FreeNet. This is an experimental network that is designed for storage of documents on multiple computers (like p2p.) No single computer holds everything, and nobody knows where the data is actually stored - the network is designed to ferret the data out, but it won't tell you where it found it. So an attacker has no easy way to disrupt the network.
Unfortunately even systems like (FreeNet) that have been hacked. Tor was hacked which is how Wikeleaks was able to download a few million documents in a short period of time.
For example, imagine that you use Google Groups for general discussion, Google Mail for direct communication and Google Documents for specific papers. All your data is on Google's servers, you have no locally saved copies (usually.) Now Google is offline, or your account is disabled (all of that happened several times already.) You are in trouble, isolated from your contacts and robbed of all your documents and messages.
An opposite example is FreeNet. This is an experimental network that is designed for storage of documents on multiple computers (like p2p.) No single computer holds everything, and nobody knows where the data is actually stored - the network is designed to ferret the data out, but it won't tell you where it found it. So an attacker has no easy way to disrupt the network.
Travis, this sounds like the kind of network some of your characters might need sometime. Analogous to what you were looking for for phones. This is something that would take a few people to set up and would only be useful if quite a few were using it, so it would only be a feasible story element in a scenario when a substantial number of people were leery of the government to that degree. But your books all have that covered. ;-)