[biff]

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.