What would techies rallying against them even do compared to anyone else? I mean sinister half-mirror surveillance shit like this is bad but I don't see how them being against it is relevant to stopping it. Adversarial patterns maybe but that doesn't seem very effective as a counter.

Especially when sinister mass surveillance approaches tend to be big, dumb, and not caring about accuracy because it is incidental to their goals. We have been screaming at them about how fighting cryptography only hurts yourself and that their use of facial recognition at scale is illiterate but they don't care.