Im sure many people on this board are like me - sick at the sheer scale of government spying that has been revealed over the last few weeks.
Well here are my thoughts and suggestions on how to fight against it.
The only way to communicate securely is by encryption, but encryption has a huge hurdle to overcome in terms of momentum and ease of use before it can become widely adopted amongst regular people. This is the key to fighting the ubiquitous surveillance state - the tools & software to communicate securely must be ridiculously easy to use AND most importantly easy to share with the people you want to communicate with.
There needs to be a catalyst to increase adoption of software that is peer to peer, secure and censorship resistant. My suggestion is to manufacture a dedicated hardware device with these attributes:
-Preloaded with an open source Linux distribution installed with Torchat, Bitmessage and a Bitcoin client. The Tails distro could be good for this.
-Cheap enough (as in Raspberry Pi cheap) to buy one and give another one away to your friends & family. Giving the devices away will build momentum behind using encrypted software.
-Equipped with a NFC chip scanner to easily share public keys with the people you meet face to face. Alternatively, the device could show a QR code on its screen and the other device scan it with built in camera.
How cool would it be to meet someone at a conference and swipe his to device to instantly give him your Bitmessage and Bitcoin addresses?
The reason I'm fairly convinced that making a new dedicated device is the best way to do it, is that the existing phones dont meet these criteria in that they are too expensive to give away, and force you to use their closed proprietary software. Most manufacturers really don't care about your privacy, and would all bend over to put in a backdoor for the NSA in a heartbeat. This needs to be a community effort.
We could name this device the "Bitstick" or something. Im a developer so I would be willing to contribute time and funds to see this device made, as long as other people thought it was a good idea as well.
What do you guys think?