For now, we need to stop thinking and talking like this. This race is lost. The government is ready to record everything, but we are not ready to encrypt everything.
It's not enough to protect yourself, even if you could. You are not OK even if you manage to protect yourself, because your friends and family and loved ones and colleagues are mostly, if not all, compromised.
The long term goal should still be for everything to be encrypted. But the near-term goal should be to utterly dismantle the NSA. It should all be taken apart, brick from brick, and destroyed. The people who put it into place should be removed from power and prosecuted.
If data is easy to eavesdrop, then somebody will. This is also an engineering problem. We've got broadband, we've got capable CPUs, there's no excuse for not encrypting everything.
And if they do suspect you of something, they will water-board you in a country with no human rights to stop the "ticking bomb" they use to excuse themselves. Not sure how long I'd last, TBH. If you are lucky, you'll got to jail.
That's the way it is, and will be until people wake up and change politics.
You can't close pandora's box. Not only is dismantling the NSA almost hopelessly unfeasible, the technology has already been proven to exist. Much like you can't stop the invention of calculus by killing Newton, you won't kill the methodologies of cryptanalysis by destroying the NSA. That information is now within grasp of the UK, China, Russia and Security Firm X and they are more incentivised to discover them now that it has been proven possible.
We should aim to plug the holes now. The race isn't over just because another runner got a little bit ahead.
It's not enough to protect yourself, even if you could. You are not OK even if you manage to protect yourself, because your friends and family and loved ones and colleagues are mostly, if not all, compromised.
The long term goal should still be for everything to be encrypted. But the near-term goal should be to utterly dismantle the NSA. It should all be taken apart, brick from brick, and destroyed. The people who put it into place should be removed from power and prosecuted.