For the longest time, I combatted my conspiracy theorist friends who were sure the government was out to steal our freedoms by saying that such a conspiracy wou

For the longest time, I combatted my conspiracy theorist friends who were sure the government was out to steal our freedoms by saying that such a conspiracy would require collusion by far too any people, and that since the advent of the internet, that kind of thing would be near impossible. The only thing that concerned me was the possibility of controlling communications (under guise of internet censorship). I asserted that if such censorship ever got passed, our brilliant cryptologist and internet freedom fighters would step up with larger efforts such as TOR to defeat such measures, and preserve our communication freedom and privacy. Someone would start a new network, trying to resolve some of those vulnerabilities that governments and criminals had found exploitable in the past. I am no longer comfortable with that answer. It seems this has all transpired, and we have been left unprepared. Perhaps the internet is too big to fail, and people will lay down and accept the abuse we suffer, because it is too difficult to find another way? More upsetting is, perhaps those friends and relatives weren't so crazy after all?