Make it so!
I want to be clear that I’m not in any way advocating, as some have, that we should somehow stop Trump from taking the oath of office. That ship has sailed. We had an election, and Trump won. Fantasies of swift impeachment or Electoral College shenanigans are just that, fantasies. Equally unserious is the whole “Unplug the NSA” campaign, recently advocated in Time.
No, our only real hope lies in technologies of resistance that ordinary people can use to check the surveillance state’s power at every level, from the individual smartphone to the network connection to the datacenter. Specifically, we need the major companies that host our digital lives — Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and others — to immediately convene a private-sector Manhattan Project aimed at bringing security, privacy, and truly anonymous political speech back to the Internet. And if Facebook persists in its privacy-hostile stance, then Mark Zuckerberg must be rejected by business elites as a man every bit as toxic as Peter Theil.
I believe that the engineers who built this monster can tame it — they owe that to all of us. What technology has broken, technology can fix. The folks who had a hand in building our digital panopticon must give us the tools to fight it, and then we must all commit to using those tools in every area of our digital lives.