I would go even further that moving away from cloud services is nothing more than an individual mitigation that comes at a huge inconvenience and will have no m

I would go even further that moving away from cloud services is nothing more than an individual mitigation that comes at a huge inconvenience and will have no meaningful effect on the real problem. The fact that strong crypto is possible becomes this red herring that computer geeks think can save us from abusive government. But this ignores the fact that true security from government actors like the NSA is impossible without a level of inconvenience that no one will be willing to go through. Cloud services are just too convenient, and there is no way to establish meaningful assurances of privacy with any cloud provider in the current legal climate. We have to fight the ugly political fight to wrestle the power back and put the government in its place. This is unappealing to technologists because it is orders of magnitude harder to accomplish than implementing strong crypto for someone who knows what they're doing, but in turn it is orders of magnitude easier than training up the mass populace on those techniques.