So what can we do about it? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. Given our recent enlightenment of government agency behavior, what can we as citizens do to get things moving in a different direction?
I think it all begins with educating people about the issue and motivating them to care about privacy again. Ideally they would find this so distasteful that politicians must fix it.
If there isn't a political solution, it falls on the technical community to design encryption and privacy into their products that "just works". Here, ideally, the default state of Internet servers and clients would be to encrypt traffic so that they can be used through a service like TOR without worrying about an exit node snarfing usernames and passwords. Then look at integrating TOR functionality into these servers and clients as transparently as possible such that they will relay internal traffic by default and prefer hidden service connections to servers that are both public and private to reduce the need for exit nodes.
At the end of the day strong encryption can simply be made illegal, so it's more important to try to get society back to a "mind your own business" outlook. That can start with a concerted effort to talk about it among family and friends, especially at the moment when it's not a partisan issue.
1. Write to your congressman. Tell them that this is unacceptable.
2. Vote third party. Put the hurt on the major parties and force them to move, and if they do not move, remove them and put new parties in their place.
3. Educate people. This is no longer just a crazy conspiracy theory or a bunch of paranoid fears. You have cops, prosecutors, etc. admitting that this is common practice.
Also, take a moment to reflect on just how many other things had to happen for us to get into this situation. We are here because something as mundane as a traffic stop can and often does lead to a felony arrest. The intelligence gathering would accomplish nothing if it were not for the massive number of laws, the massive number of victimless crimes, and the vast power we have given to the police. The next time you hear a politician talking about the need to get tough on crime, the need to give the police more power to arrest people, the need for more laws, look back on this and ask yourself if you really want a strict law-and-order society.
Be sure to tell others about it too. We need more than an irrelevant minority to understand just how dangerous things are getting.
If there isn't a political solution, it falls on the technical community to design encryption and privacy into their products that "just works". Here, ideally, the default state of Internet servers and clients would be to encrypt traffic so that they can be used through a service like TOR without worrying about an exit node snarfing usernames and passwords. Then look at integrating TOR functionality into these servers and clients as transparently as possible such that they will relay internal traffic by default and prefer hidden service connections to servers that are both public and private to reduce the need for exit nodes.
At the end of the day strong encryption can simply be made illegal, so it's more important to try to get society back to a "mind your own business" outlook. That can start with a concerted effort to talk about it among family and friends, especially at the moment when it's not a partisan issue.