That was viable when computers were a tiny part of the world, but not when our power to change things became to great to be ignored.

Even back in the day when you could convince a public payphone to work for free by whistling the right way, that kind of interference in a public communications channel was enough for the powers that be to get worried. Now? Now phones are effectively universal, and every government can afford to pay developers to insert obfuscated backdoors in open source code, while the richest could do the same with the hardware from the silicon wafer up to the finished product. And they do, because they want to keep their power.

Just as you go to war with the army you have rather than the army you want, if you seek to improve our security and freedom you have to use the political power structures that exist rather than the ones you want to exist.