| No, we need both politics and technology. First, we need an organized and determined political movement to defend civil liberties in general and our right to privacy in particular. To an extent the EFF and ACLU fill that role, but I think we can do better. Check out the NRA for example--I happen to oppose its mission, but I am still impressed by its effectiveness. The NRA can literally decide which political campaigns get funded. If a congressperson supports real gun control, suddenly they have a well funded opponent in the primary. We need that level of organization. When our own ancient and tech illiterate congresspeople here in California try to ban encryption, we need to be organized so we can get together and replace them. Second, we need technology that provides privacy by default. For example, WhatsApp for messaging. E2E encryption is not magic, but it does make mass surveillance a lot harder, because there's no central database of everyones conversations. It does a lot to protect ordinary citizens from fishing expeditions. Deprecating plain HTTP, making HTTPS ubiquitous for the web, is also a huge win and is already underway. Both parts go together. We need to work on the politics and on the technology of freedom at the same time. |