Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the government-industrial complex to clamp down on the open internet, and even this is weak compared to the poss

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the government-industrial complex to clamp down on the open internet, and even this is weak compared to the possibility space (internet driver's licenses, etc), though it's obviously a "boiling frog" situation. But it was, and is, inevitable that this clash happens. Democracy is not achieved and then chiseled into stone permanently; it must continually be earned and fought for by real humans, every damn day. In this case, that means getting regular people on board with encrypted communication. Yes, it's an uphill battle, but we all got our friends and family to migrate from IE to Firefox. Now it's time to get them on PGP email, VPNs, etc. As geeks, we need to be educating users, creating one-click auto-privacy tools, and doing whatever else we can as Binary Minutemen to maintain a balance of power against threats to open communication.