I’d be the first to agree that expecting to win all of the battles all of the time is trivially unrealistic(both because of specific demands from things like smartcards, which need to do crypto at low cost and virtually zero power; and the general advance of absurdly fast and cheap silicon, it’s getting pretty tricky to buy hardware that is too feeble to be used for cryptographic applications, and the theory, source code, or both, for not-terribly-full-featured-but-adequate implementations could be printed and bound in less than a bookshelf worth of space, possibly a single book); but I would be very leery of discounting the possibility of a ‘most of the people, most of the time’ win.
Consider: It is 2005. Would you believe me if I told you that, even ignoring the world of gaming consoles(which are already locked down), over a billion personal computing devices that actively refuse to run anything not cryptographically blessed by the vendor would be sold within the decade, and that they would be wildly popular? Well, that’s iOS. Not only is it the biggest lockdown ecosystem to come out of nowhere in quite some time; it’s the one that most directly went gunning for market share that relatively open personal computers previously occupied(game consoles and dumbphones have generally been locked all to hell; but tended not to compete with unlocked systems. Iphones more or less annihilated the scraps of the PalmOS and PocketPC PDA/smartphone market, and ipads went hunting for lighter-duty PCs).
Consider, also, the…less than totally inspiring… uptake of things like PGP/GNUPG, despite longstanding availability. The Cypherpunk Utopia is right there for the downloading; but basically nobody wants to RTFM(plus, it doesn’t work with webmail, and kids these days just look at you funny if you talk about ‘IMAP clients’ or ‘set the SMTP server address here’).
I’d be the first to agree that the extermination of general-purpose computing is effectively impossible: new-old-stock microcontrollers salvaged from basically anything would probably keep it going for a century or more, even if all fabrication were shut down tomorrow. However, I doubt that that is necessary to get most of what they want. A ‘CALEA 2’ law aimed at the companies that control the walled gardens would get you most of the low hanging fruit; and an ongoing campaign of exploiting implementation vulnerabilities, where available, in products that can’t be thus controlled, sowing uncertainty and risk by seeding plausible-looking but backdoored ‘secure’ projects, running malicious TOR exit nodes, etc, etc. would be quite difficult to resist.
Team Total Information Awareness loses if running a secure, all-the-fancy-crypto, configuration becomes the trivially easy out-of-the-box default, and basically anyone who doesn’t actively bludgeon their devices to do something else is running it; but so long as they can keep the mass market defaults weak or nonexistent, I suspect that the remaining population of hard cases gets a lot smaller, and thus easier to surveill by other means(even if you can’t read their messages, it’s a lot hard to hide the fact that you are sending unreadable traffic than it is to generate unreadable traffic, and it is harder still to resist more aggressive techniques like ‘implants’ being added to your hardware during shipping.)
