Schneier is as always spot on in identifying and delineating surveillance issues, but his assumption of the necessity of institutional controls renders his discussion of potential remedies of null utility. Regardless of the motivations of individuals delegating their personal authority to such institutions and the rhetoric that involves, the inhumanity of institutions lends to psychopaths, similarly inhumane, existential power to control them, and thus society comprised of good individual people seeking to effect their felicity and prosperity.

The technologies enabling surveillance, correlation, and discrimination aren't potentially limitable by any conceivable institutional mechanisms. Instead freedom and society will be necessarily enabled by adopting those exact mechanisms and applying them to the very parties, institutional and otherwise, that seek to profit from them by preying on free people(s). As mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and the variety of decentralized means of production of goods and services continue to develop and disperse across society, it will be increasingly impossible to centralized authority to parasitize and profit from them. As the parasitic extraction of wealth by centralized institutions decreases, the sovereign possession and creation of wealth will increasingly inure to and remain the power of the individuals themselves, who produce it at their sole option.

It is absolutely and utterly counterproductive to even consider institutional mechanisms that have become existential threats to the felicity of ourselves and our posterity as potential ways to manage and reduce such threats. Einstein pointed out that the thinking that produced challenges is incapable of surmounting them, and Schneier seems not to have grasped that paradigm in the context of institutional predation on society and individual sovereignty.

Thanks!