> We demand a perfect security which is getting ever harder to achieve.
In the US we claim to be "land of the free; home of the brave". I don't think the public lives up to the bravery aspect. That involves accepting some level of risk, in exchange for freedom. Humans have free will and theoretically that's the root of evil. So unless we're going to lose our humanity we need to stop worrying about irrational or rare possibilities.
The other things the author mentions I guess I agree with but I think it's naive. Yes, better crypto and some help from the vendors and cloud providers will improve things.
But ultimately any device can be bugged, any chip can be backdoored, and I think we're a ways from securely printing our own computers. Satellites can zoom in anywhere. Microphones like ShotSpotter can listen. To some extent the people need to be brave about this surveillance too and not go paranoid.
But we also need to lay down some justice for those who broke the Constitution. The leaders of these bureaucracies should be tried in capital cases for treason, war crimes, or espionage. That would clearly establish right and wrong in society for some years to come. And for all the lower level LEOs knowingly sharing in NSA data or doing parallel reconstruction, they should be tried for their crimes too. We need to clean house.
The states also need an new Constitutional mandate for provide oversight to Congress. For some reason the checks and balances have completely broken down and D.C. needs the power inverted on them.
After all that's done, then tell me about better encryption. But until then, none of the tech matters except for making the intel agencies' lives slightly harder. But in reality all we've done is give the 5-eyes an edge on the rest of the world's intel by raising the difficulty mode to expert.