actually in this case, and many cases, they do. Social and political problems are just the brain-dead cousins of technical problems, and technical solutions can be applied across all of them provided a sufficient level of technical understanding of the given problem's cause and propagation pipeline; in the case of data theft by crooked governments, one need only encrypt one's data to upset and break that problem's pipeline, which requires seized data to be readable by unauthorized third-party entities who do not possess the necessary credentials to decrypt it. PGP's pub/priv key pairing solution for encrypting email is an excellent example of how this can work to disrupt the spying problem-- only the intended recipient can decrypt the message because his/her public key is used in the encryption process and will require his/her private key to decrypt. So long as we never share our private keys, spying should not be an issue. Of course these encryption algorithms could be broken by third-parties, but it would be an extremely arduous process requiring years of expensive processing by expensive computer clusters, and government spooks neither have the resources nor the knowledge to even attempt such actions, much less the motivation unless they are working with data intercepted from someone who is known to be an actual threat based on his/her actions. The lesson from all this spying business is not that the global internet is dead or that we cannot trust big corporations with our data-- everyone should have already known not to trust entities driven by money before anything else and the global internet can remain strong for as long as we wish; we just have to be more diligent in encrypting our secrets. That said, we also need to develop more advanced and difficult to reverse encryption algorithms which focus on peer to peer communication rather than single-point-of-failure keys held by corporations who might, and probably will, give them over to government spooks if pressured to do so. Consider the last twenty some-odd years as the 'free love' era of the internet, and the US government's crimes as the inevitable AIDS-riddled aftermath; when sexually transmitted diseases came to light, sexuality was not derailed. Instead we got smarter about protecting ourselves. The solution to the problem introduced by the disease that is the US government today is similar: encrypt everything, and trust no one until they've proven they are worthy of trust! Also notable is that encryption only breaks the execution pipeline of the problem, it doesn't solve it; that is sufficient to protect our data, but it should be kept in mind that the root of the problem, a sense of god-like entitlement by government officials and the ability to instill fear in citizens and corporations that backs up this false sense, also must be addressed as soon as possible. Organization like Demand Progress, RootsAction, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are doing some great work coordinating messages from the citizenry to government officials informing them that we will not stand for this abuse; check them out and lend whatever aid you can, and in short order the cause of the spying problem will be burned away and the internet can begin to heal.
