I think the "technology is advancing more rapidly than governments' attempts" works well when the technology allows people the communicate much easier with each other, and then it makes it easy for people to group and create extremely massive protests against such attempts.
I think this part works a lot better than what you must be thinking - that we'll keep escaping governments through technical stuff, such as building darknets and whatnot. The problem with that is that while we may succeed in creating such solutions, it still ends up ultimately worse for us. Because now everyone has to become more technical to use these darknets, or to become anonymous, or to share stuff with each other, which will all be much harder than it is now on the Internet.
This is why the solution should always be a political one, and not a technical one, because if we lose on the politics side, it means things will get worse for us from a user experience point of view, and it will only be a short-to-medium term solution anyway, until they come after that solution, too. So instead of trying to always be one step ahead through technical means, we should try and stand up for our rights from the beginning, when it's all starting, and make sure that the political solution lasts for decades until they try again.
Here's an example. Instead of letting them pass laws that allow for warrantless monitoring of e-mails, which would then mean we'd all have to learn to use encrypted anonymous e-mail messages (which sounds like a pain), we should protest to create a law that demands warrants for that. And that's pretty much what we've achieved with the new ECPA now. While not always possible, the political solution is so much better than the technical one, and we should always strive to solve these problems through politics first.
I think this part works a lot better than what you must be thinking - that we'll keep escaping governments through technical stuff, such as building darknets and whatnot. The problem with that is that while we may succeed in creating such solutions, it still ends up ultimately worse for us. Because now everyone has to become more technical to use these darknets, or to become anonymous, or to share stuff with each other, which will all be much harder than it is now on the Internet.
This is why the solution should always be a political one, and not a technical one, because if we lose on the politics side, it means things will get worse for us from a user experience point of view, and it will only be a short-to-medium term solution anyway, until they come after that solution, too. So instead of trying to always be one step ahead through technical means, we should try and stand up for our rights from the beginning, when it's all starting, and make sure that the political solution lasts for decades until they try again.
Here's an example. Instead of letting them pass laws that allow for warrantless monitoring of e-mails, which would then mean we'd all have to learn to use encrypted anonymous e-mail messages (which sounds like a pain), we should protest to create a law that demands warrants for that. And that's pretty much what we've achieved with the new ECPA now. While not always possible, the political solution is so much better than the technical one, and we should always strive to solve these problems through politics first.