The more talented people work on privacy-invading technology, the more powerful, pervasive, and smoothly-running the surveillance state will be.
Most of us have the choice to deny the surveillance state our own talent. We can work at more privacy-respecting firms and on more privacy-respecting projects. We can try to educate people about privacy, and advocate for positive change. We can even actively work to counter the surveillance aparatus by building crypto, stego, mesh-network and other privacy and anonymity enhancing technologies. Most of us probably don't have the luxury of doing this latter as our day job, but certainly as a side project -- if we care enough and want to make a difference.
Sure, but those things only need to be built once.