Shinobi starts out with a pretty nice summary:
So, how did we get here? Eight months after the election of a president who describes himself as a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate, after the Department of Justice themselves have explicitly stated that they are not going to engage in regulation by prosecution, or prosecute mixing services, how was Roman Storm found guilty?
Which leads to the following conclusion:
"The government’s word is worthless. It means nothing."
While this is a mindset to which I am very sympathetic, I don't really agree with where it leads Shinobi:
We need to stop begging them for clauses and riders in bills. We need to take them to court. We need to stop kissing their ass and pandering to their egos and notion of public persona. We need to call them out as the two-faced spineless people they are.
I don't see why we would expect our courts to function any differently than the other branches of our government. The very fact that we have the third party doctrine is evidence that the courts will disregard the constitution if they see fit.
Sure, we can point to the cypherpunks' victory in court that secured our use of encryption, but it feels like an exception rather than the rule. What would have been the outcome if they'd had a different judge who ruled against them?
Shinobi does conclude that if the courts don't work, we'll have to embrace civil disobedience. And that's great, but I wish he'd made been a little more specific: I'm not so sure that civil disobedience itself wins the battle, rather it's being willing to develop and use technologies that make your disobedience effective.
One of the most hopeful things for me is reading stories about the governmental responses to invasive species. Unless the government goes full scorched earth, it's almost always a lost cause. By the time they see one bullfrog or zebra clam or whatever, there are a million in the bushes, breeding like mad. Information is like this. As long as people are willing to use the tools we have, I don't think any government will be able to keep up.
This is one of the reasons things like copyparty catch my imagination.