The most important problem of our time is the risk of losing all privacy. We must work to make strong crypto widely accessible to the masses.
It always reminds me of a shocking fact in Dutch history: In the Netherlands, the Germans managed to exterminate a relatively large proportion of the Jews. The main reason was that before the war, the Dutch authorities had required citizens to register their religion so that church taxes could be distributed among the various religious organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance)
And this looks so quaint now. We can only imagine what potentially damning information a totalitarian government can now find about every citizen retroactively.
Digital networks are increasingly an intermediate in every little communication and transaction between people. And with the internet of things, in everything we do, in the future maybe even inside our bodies (what's after Google Glass?).
We really need a way to prevent rampant data collection, otherwise the internet is a large threat to civilization. I didn't go into technology to facilitate some 1984-ish world government :(
Given that I don't see that as being feasible we should ask ourselves instead what can be done to avoid a homicidal state, even under the assumption that they have more computing power available than in your iPhone.
"If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised."
There's no obvious getting started guide, no plain English explanation stating that Pidgin must be installed first, nothing about configuring for first use, and nothing about starting a verified conversation.
If the government has a very big disk, then let's fill that very big disk with tons of crap.
NSA: "We're at 95% utilization of our storage. We better delete some old stuff so we have room for new data."
-- OR --
NSA: "Hey Congress, encryption usage has skyrocketed! We need more money to buy more storage to save all this encrypted data we're capturing!"
The design of the network has a role to play. Is it possible to design a network that doesn't expose where information is flowing, or better yet, doesn't even need to know where information is flowing (it can't leak what it doesn't know)? Such a network would presumably not require an address space.
Freenet does something like this, exchanging messages by a process akin to a dead drop and restricting each node's view of the network to its immediate neighbours. I'm thinking something like Freenet, but operating as a physical network rather than an overlay network. Does such a thing already exist?
Post encrypted messages to Usenet; since anyone can receive them, there is no need for a destination address. Post the messages through anonymous remailers (mix-nets) if you want to avoid revealing that you sent them.
This problem was solved a long time ago.
I don't think that, in its current form, it is scalable by any means. I do think that it's a good start, however.
We won the important battle getting the regulations largely out of the way. If we can't achieve pervasive always on encryption— and at least kill passive dragnet content collection dead— then can we achieve anything at all?