For at least a decade, but more markedly so in the last eighteen months or so, I can't get on the Internet without seeing a story like this. Authorities of all sorts ignore any laws they feel like to provide the appearance of security against threats that usually don't exist in the first place. Revelations in technology that show absolutely nothing is secure unless you are manually rolling dice to construct one-time pad keys, and god help you if you try to store them on a post-2000 PC. I'm coming steadily closer to panic, as a citizen, as a technology professional, and as a human being. What can we do? No rational discussion of this ever takes place, both online and off, because of the hordes of comments insisting that the US will NEVER be as bad as a real authoritarian regime NO MATTER WHAT, and the equally radical comments that we are already WORSE than the USSR. So far as I am convinced, there is nothing an individual can do. This is a Big Problem, and going back over history texts, political activism only solves about one Big Problem per decade. So, for the sake of argument, I ask we suspend whatever structural beliefs we have. Assume, for this comment thread, that the current decline into a rightless police state will continue unabated, only stopped by the random sudden social upheaval that, without fail, takes place sooner or later. What can an individual do to be safe, or feel safe? Anything? Or is the only option to shut up, take our Xanax, and live with the Cold War-esque existential fear that you could be violated or killed at any time just because an agent doesn't like your ethnicity/choice of cleaning supplies/fact that you work in technology?