Authorities can in practice permit themselves to do anything they damn well want, I'm not under any illusions otherwise. But I want to do everything I can to try to make sure that neither they nor anyone else are able to perform mass surveillance - because I know damned well there is now no other way of stopping such grossly horrendous violations of everyone's inalienable rights to privacy. They lie routinely; they have no oversight, no accountability, no limits, no apologies, no truths, and absolutely no hope of reform inside a system that is not even prepared to acknowledge what it is doing is wrong, let alone stop it.
Talk is cheap, but I will state now that no legislation of any kind will stop me trying to develop, publish, advocate and deploy strong encryption and anti-surveillance techniques everywhere that I can: places where such techniques are illegal are uniformly the places that need it most. Maybe trying to bring a little more 'civil liberty through complex mathematics' is all I can do: but it's something.