USG, having become entirely inconsistent with its founding philosophy, the purported highest law of the land, and the People's will, has ceased being a legitimate government by or for the People. It should instead be regarded as an uncontrolled, extremely powerful entity to be avoided at all costs, and hopefully worked around eventually.
The job for hackers now is to develop alternatives to allow people to exit USG's sphere of influence. Whether that means emigration to other countries, or longer term projects like SpaceX and seasteading is a tactical matter. But first we need to realize that this government and its enthusiastic enforcers (including especially many of the lawyers and apologists who have brought dishonor upon themselves in these recent Swartz threads) are the problem and the source of much of the world's woes.
We might live in the US, we might live in one of USG's many colonies around the world, but this government is no longer responsive to the people and it does not deserve our custom. It's time to find alternatives.
Personally, after trying out various political decompositions, I don't even have a straightforward answer to this. I still cling to a hope that as technology progresses, it will empower people to be informed and mostly autonomous, easily moving between any still-necessary minimal domains of leadership/authority to keep them responsible to those they serve.
But don't worry, democracies usually aren't overthrown. And this one, being ultimately ruled by capital, certainly won't be. But it still is dying, and may even get there in our lifetimes. In the worst case, it will face this long period of decline followed by ultimate economic and thus societal collapse. This process will not be pretty, and we can only hope that whomever fills the resulting power vacuum isn't preaching a message of a scarcity-free utopia, if you know what I mean.
The better outcome is one in which this failing husk of a nation is used to incubate (and is slowly replaced by) more agile and sustainable methods of societal interaction and coordination - based on voluntary interactions on the Internet. For rough examples, we can look at the positive ideas of cryptoanarchism for example implementations of various things (and please note that these technologies evidently play out much differently than was forseen). We don't need a "first amendment" and constant struggles to define a uniform meaning of freedom of expression for 300M people. We can codify the first pass of this concept by running TOR, and let much smaller autonomous groups use the resulting environment as a starting point for refinements appropriate to their community. Likewise with economic policy and many other issues that are currently centrally and unaccountably dictated by Uncle Sam. There's obviously a whole host of things I'm not or am unable to address, and focusing on any particular philosophy/technology is missing the larger picture (which is why I avoid doing so). However, the beauty in this approach is that if you decide you don't like it, but still believe in everyone's right to be generally left alone, you can simply not participate.
I suggest you read up on your U.S. history. Despite its problems, the U.S. is the closest to its intended purpose than its ever been in history. Women, minority, and slaves were not citizens when this nation was founded; people did not directly elect their senators for several decades; free speech and freedom of religion was generally regarded as an "ideal," not an absolute right, until the start of the 20th century (or in the case of religion, until nearly WWII).
Centralized government dictates most laws to the states. The citizens are completely disarmed with respect to government. The entire population being tracked, surveilled, and permanently recorded. There is a complete lack of due process, including presumed guilty until plea bargained. There is a standing army occupying our conquered yet not-incorporated colonies. And around one third of everyone's income is taken as taxation to support all of the above.
Now you may not consider the above facts important, and your livelihood may even depend on ignoring them. But please stop pretending they do not exist or were even somehow part of the original plan for a country of self determination.
If you were screwed over by federal prosecutors in 1952 as a result of an anti-Communist prosecution under the Smith act, to which message board would you have appealed?
If you find my observation credible, you are of course in no way prohibited from making the case that our system is unjust or ineffective or capricious. Progress maybe be slow; progress towards greater justice can always use acceleration.
It is possible for you and 'rprasad to be right simultaneously. Nobody has to be "negligent".