More Encryption Is Not the Solution

Also, while politics sometimes trumps cryptography, the opposite happens just as often. All the police force is useless if they don't know where to point their guns (see Silk Road)

It makes eavesdropping without a warrant harder. However, in some countries the refusal to turn over a private key to the police is already a crime [1]. I don't find it hard to imagine that governments would seek to require that private keys are handed to the government or that they would reintroduce a Clipper-like chip. Especially if it becomes harder to wiretap via Facebook et al.

I agree that a political solution is strongly preferable, but I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen.

I am not sure. I think that under sufficient political pressure, it could happen in Europe. Perhaps with the wrong motivation (weakening the position of US companies), but some influential politicians (e.g. Neelie Kroes) have been very critical of Prism. Of course, we don't know that much of the breadth of data collection of EU security agencies...

[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/uk_police_can_...

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/prism-fallout-could-cost-us-cloud-indus...

Implementing what you suggest is just such a lot of work. Certainly too much for me, when I weight up the odds I'll fall foul of Big Brother ( as an Oz living in London. Burma, Saudi, etc have clear problems )

I believe that if one comes on the radar of Big Brother, it is for boring mundane reasons like they don't like your politics, they don't like someone you communicate with or you're a lawyer representing someone they don't like.

There are clearly edge cases with serious consequences, such as a police chief fancies your wife and uses privilege to mess with you. But these are rare thank G-d, and one probably has a heads up that this is occurring.

In this context of very low probability consequences, how can I justify all the effort ??

With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills.

Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you don't mix things up. You never login into your Gmail on Tor, don't refer to your reddit user name on Gmail, etc.

Unless you already did, in which case you're toast. They already have years of data on your views and interests.

Could we make a browser extension that would compare all you do and force privacy for you? For example, if you mistakenly mention your anonymous identity in your official mail, to catch it before sending. It should have a list of forbidden things - keywords, user names, etc - and send watch people not to mix the pots. Take care to separate cookies between anonymous mode and public mode. I am sure such an extension would go 99% of the way to making your private online life private again.

I envision a whole suite of apps - browser, mail, messaging, file sharing - written with this goal in mind - to separately manage identities - private and public - based on the content of communication. Like spam filters, but applied to all our data leaks.

I for one don't feel like making it easy for the NSA, a foreign agency in my case, to spy on me. I owe it to my privacy to at least try and protect it.

The political change that is necessary is out of my reach in the case of PRISM, as I am not from the US. I can only hope that the American public will realize how bad this really is and act accordingly. After all, this is still a democracy and it will be until all privacy has been taken away completely.