We need a Butlerian Jihad against surveillance. You know what will never stop this? Posts on hacker news. Letters to your congressman (LG can donate a fuqton more to his re-election campaign than you can). Voting with your dollar (people who know what a privacy policy is are few and far between). You know what will? Taking these TVs into the street, smashing and burning them. Mobs storming Best Buy and smashing the s…
I'm totally fine with your exciting-as-fuck politics but it will be difficult to get people to that point any time soon, me thinks. I think the problem is that when you say things like "these things don't work" you're glossing over the key to why they don't work: people aren't organized. That's it. It may not be glamorous or fun like tossing over the pigmobile but it's proven to work every single time throughout hist…
It does. The "freedom of assembly" is very powerful, even if it doesn't get as much attention as the freedom of speech or the press. Seeing that there are others that share your outrage is an amazing motivator, as it shows, in a very personal way, that you don't have to accomplish everything yourself. Even better, it becomes easier to get others to join in and help as the group grows. Many are reluctant to be a first-mover, but will join a group once they see they will have the support of allies.
Unfortunately, FVEY agencies are not stupid. Mapping relationships to find the focal points that start or enable this kind of social organizing so they can be disrupted is a very good strategy. Even just the phone call-record and COTRAVELER[1] are likely enough to be able to find the leaders/organizers among any particular group. If you add in a few of the other tools we've seen recently, it must have been trivial to create a modern variant of COINTELPRO. Compared to the FBI's efforts under Hoover, GCHQ's "JTRIG"[2] is probably a lot easier and far more effective.
So yes, I totally agree - good old-fashioned organizing is something we need, and we need it fast. More importantly, we need it as a sustained effort to focus on a couple key topics, and we might actually see some progress.
I am not sure this is possible as long as "most" people still have food and a roof over their head. Groups start to form and ideas start to spread, but these efforts inevitably get distracted[3] or sidetracked with off-topic political minutia or divide-and-conquer wedge issues. Unfortunately, I suspect that technology will make organizing people effectively impossible until this mess impacts them personally in big, obvious, painful and/or expensive ways.
Of course, I would absolutely love to be proven wrong sbout this entire topic...
[1] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/how-the-nsa-is-t...
[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...
[3] For an example relevant to this crowd, see PHK's "PSYOPS For Nerds" regarding yet another useless and distracting "BSD vs GPL" argument.