The article that appears to have broken this story:

Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020304057.html

See also the discussion about the "corporate espionage attack" from China on the nettime list:

 http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/2010-January/thread.html#1982

Wouldn't it be more wise to stop using google altogether?

Why not use other search engines that aren't run by monstrous corporations?
There is even one that is private and secure:  https://ixquick.com

As activists, I just feel we should be moving away from things like google, GMail, and things like that, which are only tools of the state and will only end up biting us all on the ass. Especially when we have riseup for e-mail, and if you can't manage to get an account there then get hushmail. If you want encryption, Hushmail sorts it out for you can get GPG open source online for free anyway. And then there's Trucrypt for the full disk encryption...

I still agree though, that google should certainly not be getting involved in this!

So you have Ghostery installed to deal with the Google web bugs on 3rd party sites:

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609

You use SSL Scroogle for your Google searches:

 https://ssl.scroogle.org/

And you have the plugin installed:

 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12506

But still you just need one friend or family member or activist you work with to have a Gmail account and *your* email ends up in Google internal, searchable by the spooks, database... Then you have someone send you a link to a Google map and you find that with noscript installed,  http://noscript.net/ the map is more-or-less unusable so you have to enable Javascript for maps.google.co.uk and you have to allow it to set cookies...

It's virtually impossible not to have some of your net movements and content not end up in Google's database these days :-|

another nice thing to add to your browser is this

 http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/

provides google continuously with random searches, so any real searches you make are disguised. also cocks up the quality of their commercial analysis. if everyone used it they'd be stuffed.

Hushmail will turn your PGP key over to the state with a court order:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail

Basically, if you don't have physical control over your PGP key at all times, you can't trust it.

Hushmail relies on them keeping a copy of your secret key and "promising" never to reveal it. Unless they get a court order, or who knows what else? Big enough bribe? Being blackmailed?

PGP=Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption standard commonly used with email:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPGP