Yes. The answer to this scandal is not making it technically harder for the government to get our information. I would compare it to DRM/piracy issue. Most of us on HN would agree that creating new, more onerous, and more difficult to crack DRM is not the answer to piracy. You instead convince pirates that it is more ethical, easier, or less risky to purchase something than pirate it.

The general citizen is not going to win a spy game against the NSA. Our only hope of preventing something like this from happening again is to put legal penalties and precautions in place to make sure that the government does not overstep its bounds. Using burner phones isn't going to accomplish anything.

I don't think the analogy to piracy is a good one. DRM is not theoretically possible. If someone can view media, they can copy it, end of story. You can make it harder, but it's always going to be with tricks, not solid theory.

Crypto, on the other hand, is theoretically possible, as far as I know. There may be holes in what's currently out there, but there's no reason in theory you can't end up with a crypto solution that the NSA can't crack. And I see no reason to think that you can't do this now. The idea that the NSA has cracked RSA or AES or whatever is just a little too out there IMO.

Rendering the government unable to read your communications is always a better solution than convincing them to promise that they will not. Technological solutions allow the individual to have control over trust.

Burner phones are not crypto, but they are a good idea for similar reasons.