You could find politicians who have the same values as you and work to support them. You could start a PAC that contributes to the campaigns of candidates who promise to change the things you don't like. You could run for elected office yourself.
Ultimately though if you're relying upon intelligence agencies, ISPs, etc to change what they do, good luck. Unless I can be elected head of the NSA, the democractic process isn't going to help much here.
If you want to "fight back" as a technical person, please do something useful:
- Learn some applied cryptography and use that knowledge to write and review cryptographic software. Develop and analyze anonymity networks. Work towards development of powerful peer to peer replacements for existing centralized technologies.
- Deploy systems with this technology
- Teach others to take advantage of it
Don't waste your time and everyone else's with worthless campaigns such as this. The only real way to change is to defeat the useful purpose of spying.
> Don't waste your time and everyone else's with worthless campaigns such as this. The only real way to change is to defeat the useful purpose of spying.
Wrong. The only reason that the spying is happening is that it is accepted and allowed. The mentality needs to be clear: only police states(evil states) spy on citizens (their country and others) without a clear reason (c.f. 4th amendment of the US). The concept of mass surveillance needs to be dumped into the ashbin of the US history, along with the internment camps and the Trail of Tears.
Only when the mental restraints of the police/espionage forces are lifted does strong encryption become a working requirement for free speech.
As a technical person, I would argue that our responsibility is to educate non-technical people on what is happening and the ramifications thereof - encouraging artists to explore the idea of the panopticon; encouraging writers to ruminate on the matter in fiction and non-fiction; talking to police and politicians about what security really means in practical purpose; talking to the neighbors about the implications of the coming internet of things and what mass surveillance means then.
We desperately need less user hostile encryption technologies but our control regime for abusive surveillance technology must include create a societal norm that these systems are morally unacceptable. The toolkit to do this is the popular democratic process and these campaigns are essential in this effort.
> - Wholesale compromises of devices if they meet certain selectors.(Jacob Applebaum and Der Spiegel's reporting)
You're kidding, right? Most of those are hardware attacks that were guaranteed to be possible with physical access. A few exploits for sure, but definitely 100% expected stuff. If you want to thwart such attacks, use anonymity networks under virtual environments. Or consider that perhaps you're not high value enough for them to risk 0-day exploits on.
> - Self replicating government malware with stockpiled zero days.( Flame and Stuxnet)
Yes, anyone can write malware. It's fucking piss simple. This has little-to-nothing to do with mass surveillance. Again, virtualized environments which force things over an anonymity network are relatively simple to set up and beat this.
> - Secret court orders for parties to turn over their encryption keys.(Lavabit)
This could easily be thwarted if the solutions I suggested were used. End-to-end encryption is the only sort which should be used.
Easily thwarted. Use redphone or mumble. Run Orbot or similar on your phone for more. If you don't want your phone tracked, you're probably screwed, but if it's the actual data you care about then you have options.
> - Comprise of networking gear for large scale traffic analysis.
Have a party with that encrypted network data. Get cracking. Passive or even MITM attacks don't matter against every solution I mentioned.
So please, stop with your paranoid bullshit. The cryptography is good and solves most of these problems.
Yes, anonymity networks are a key to this and must be developed further, but it's far from as bad as you make it sound.
So instituting a massive cultural shift in adoption of strong encryption technologies AND winning an arms race against the NSA's inevitable attempts to subvert them is simpler than pushing for political change that is supported by the majority of the population and has strong support in congress and industry?
Both approaches are useful and can be complementary, but if you have to put all your money on one horse, I think you're choosing the wrong one.
But it hasn't done so or has completely failed to do so. Most people I've discussed this with have generally supported privacy, some have even changed usage habits to do so.
I believe there have been wide studies even on this that have largely shown that people world wide are against such practices.
Who's settling? Awareness is much more achievable for far less effort and has exponential effects in how many people can affect the issue.
Always take half-measure, if cost-benefit or your own priorities indicate it's worthwhile, and don't hide behind canned responses to justify irrationality.
I know tokenadult recommends the Albert Einstein Institution's writings.
What are other effective and positive ways to influence the culture besides being "Angry Tech People"?