I think people often underestimate it, but one of the biggest influences you can have -- I mean you, the HN reader! -- may be cultural.

People who work on building surveillance, people who have done it, people who may do it in the future, are your classmates in your CS program, your colleagues in your startup, your neighbors, your fellow conference attendees, you.

Folks who work at NSA (and all the other places that don't get so much press) read xkcd religiously, they go to DEF CON, they have Linux and math t-shirts, they read HN, they are reading this thread right now, and all the other threads.

If people like you in the cultures that you're part of decide that surveillance is cool and exciting, that's more talent to take the billions of dollars and vast intellectual challenges of figuring out how to eliminate the vestiges of privacy. If they decide it's uncool and sketchy, that's more talent that goes elsewhere and does something else.

There are many overlapping subcultures in technology and they don't all understand or talk to each other that much, and plenty of technology employers are recruiting out of many different subcultures, so you can't assume that the culture you create in your circles will control the path of technology. But the cultural attitudes of people in the tech world can have a powerful effect on what people decide is worth working on.