I'm skeptical. All of the articles cited are indeed about civil liberties, but I don't see them as being problems that can necessarily be improved by developin

I'm skeptical. All of the articles cited are indeed about civil liberties, but I don't see them as being problems that can necessarily be improved by developing better cryptography. The social network propaganda isn't so much of a technological problem as a social one -- people assume that everyone's using social networks in a straightforward way, to express themselves and connect with friends, even though they have the capacity to be used in many other ways, including deceptively. The NSA email-hoarding thing is also a social problem -- encryption exists, it's just that nobody uses it. The "pre-crime screening" appears to be a statistical model. I don't yet know if there's a science of counter-machine-learning -- that is, creating examples that are hard for models to classify, analogously to making harder and harder CAPTCHAs. If government gets better at data science, what civil libertarians will need is not better encriptions, but different techniques designed to protect against statistical intrusions. Likewise, I don't think better crypto is in any straightforward way a protection against biometrics or government bills to take down certain websites. If he's saying "we need more libertarians and people concerned about civil liberties," then he's right. But I'm not even sure there are fewer than there used to be (look at the backlash to SOPA). I just suspect think there was a time when people had more hope in purely technological fixes to government abuses. I know some old-time crypto-anarchists, and they're largely disappointed with how things have turned out. In the end, preventing the abuse of government power is a hard problem, and it looks less likely that a small set of tech breakthroughs will suddenly make civil liberties violations obsolete.