The only way to technologically enable the second option is to put a foundational laws into the universe design which enables "hiding" of less powerful agents from more powerful - i.e. privacy.

It seems that the Universe we live in enables that – at least existence of such mathematical constructs as hash functions and discrete logarithm problem for elliptic curves suggests such an option.

Thus, any civilization striving for a long-term survival needs to develop privacy technologies and (as a consequence) censorship-resistance at the scale of inter-agent communications.

The above also gives a perfect explanation to the Fermi paradox: the evolved civilizations must hide behind cryptographic systems which makes them for the external observer to be indistinguishable from the rest of cosmic background.