I feel this is a very important article with a very important message, but I'm just not sure what I can do to help! They have money, guns, political support, media and very powerful, highly emotional rhetoric. The only thing I can do is hack on software, but most people don't care enough about "geeky stuff". I feel that the only way this issues will get resolved is if they get much, much worse first (i.e. high-profile people jailed for what they say, internet controlled China-style, disappearance of middle class, ...).
Well you can always hack on decentralised, encrypted, hidden peer to peer chat, or other open software alternatives of high quality for all the services we use every day and so forth. If media is a problem, work on solutions for anonymous publishing etc.. if the software is good enough (including having a good ui and whatnot), it's less geeky. After all, people adopted BitTorrent, which is quite geeky!
Providing technical workarounds for broken policy can only do so much. It doesn't fix policy. It can only help avoiding enforcement.
Which might lead to court cases where they try to make an example of a poor sap they have caught.
This has already happened to some extent with peer to peer file sharing.
a) only few individual users get caught and dragged through the courts, but they get slapped with damages in the hundred-thousands[1].
b) there is no big mafia boss responsible for everything they could hold accountable. So now they go after companies making software[2] or after sites such as TPB. Not on the premises that they did anything illegal themselves but that they enabled others to do so.
So who says that the net of what's illegal won't get cast even wider in the future if someone were to develop something that's even harder for them to prosecute? Or one could even argue that evasion through technology leads to policy becoming even more restrictive, even if that restrictive policy remains largely ineffective except for those few that actually get hit by it.
I'm not saying that the technology shouldn't be developed, I'm just saying that it doesn't automatically make society more free by itself. It just provides an underground in which one may move.
