My point is that it is not possible to eternally prevent the government for from surveillance. The technology is quickly getting easier and cheaper, and will very shortly, if not already, be available to any company who wants it. Look at things like Siri and Alexa. As those technologies get further refined, what's to prevent them being added to your smart TV, your smart refrigerator, your smart light bulb?
What's to prevent somebody, whether its your government, another government, or marketing firms, to pay other companies to add this technology to their products? To various extents, this has already happened.
If you want you information to not be available to the highest bidder, the only way will be to hide it, and that will require increasing vigilance and technology.
My point is that any of that technology can be made illegal in an instant, making it completely irrelevant.
Without political rights and protections, privacy technology is worthless.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
-- Hillel the Elder
This seems crazy. The only fight is the first one.
If use of encryption is made illegal (for example), and the penalties involved include going to prison, will you, reverend_gonzo, personally still continue to use encryption?
If so, I applaud you, but my intuition is that only a tiny percentage will be willing to take that risk.
Any technological advancement, even breakthroughs that took decades to make, can be made illegal in a day. What use is privacy technology if you can be put in jail for using it?
Even if the risk is small, it will always be there, and a proper boot-on-face government like China will easily squash adoption of even the most miraculous privacy innovations.