It is especially popular in these parts to revel in, or at least shrug off, the dysfunction that has ground the gears of self-government to a halt. When the federal government manufactures fiscal crises, constructs metadata dragnets, and infiltrates private information networks, bright and well-intentioned people could be forgiven for electing to opt-out of democratic politics. They could be forgiven, but they would be misguided.

Bright and concerned citizens at Stanford and elsewhere cannot hope to withdraw from the political process and escape state regulation to some Valhalla in the cloud. Stanford’s own Balaji Srinivasan’s “exit” to an “opt-in society, based on technology, outside of the United States” is not an option. Power fills a vacuum.

Abdication from the democratic process does not immunize these would-be decampers from the state and its laws. Their withdrawal merely exposes them to the regulatory whimsy of the remaining electoral majority—a majority dominated by rent-seekers and private interest groups.

To take just one example, consider the future of the NSA’s recently revealed metadata collection program. Under the program, federal anti-terror agencies like the NSA and FBI order telecommunications providers to produce and deliver “metadata” from any telephone call they handle with a United States nexus. This includes recording and delivering lists of telephone numbers, call times, durations, and origin points. Ruefully, the Obama administration has defended the program.

The President’s Department of Justice has argued that the program is both constitutional under the Fourth Amendment (meaning that it is categorically something Congress is allowed to authorize the NSA to do) and legal under an updated provision of the PATRIOT Act (meaning that Congress did in fact authorize it). Civil libertarians and pending federal lawsuits dispute both parts of the administration’s argument.

But in analysis for a forthcoming publication, I find that while the program is illegal—it is objectively impossible for the NSA to have meet the PATRIOT Act’s reasonable grounds and relevancy requirements—it is, nonetheless, constitutional by various accounts.

The three arguments break down like this. First, black-letter Fourth Amendment jurisprudence permits the government to collect this kind of information without a warrant. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to mean that the government cannot listen in on private phone conversations without a warrant since people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those conversations.

However, the Court has ruled that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information they voluntarily convey to a third-party, such as the telephone number one dials and relays to a phone company when placing a call. Courts have extended this ruling to exclude constitutional protection for any metadata (like call time, duration, location) similarly conveyed to the phone company.

Second, a novel theory based on concurring opinions in a recent Supreme Court decision that suggests a more stringent Fourth Amendment standard wouldn’t apply to the facts in the metadata collection case, even if it were formally adopted.

Third, even the Fourth Amendment rights of telecommunication providers are not implicated by NSA production orders.

If correct, this means that even though Congress has not passed a law authorizing the NSA to conduct this type of dragnet surveillance, they could still pass such a law in the future. In fact, though some in Congress are mobilizing to terminate the program against the President’s wishes, others with considerable influence are defending it.

With recent polls showing that the country is evenly split in its support for the program, senior California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is already planning to codify the program by introducing an amendment to the PATRIOT Act.

Politics will thus determine the future of the program and the integrity of your privacy, and citizens will have substantial influence over the outcome. Not only will the nation elect a new Congress who will make that determination next year, but the issue of NSA surveillance splits party lines and Congress itself: in July, a split party vote in the House to limit the NSA failed by just seven votes.

With an issue like this, individual Congresspersons face less institutional pressure from leadership and pay more attention to constituents and polling. Under these conditions informing and organizing friends and family to contact their representatives and vote can actually make a difference and halt the NSA in its tracks by electing or persuading just a few representatives to de-authorize the program.

Now if you believe in Srinavasan’s secessionist Internet utopia, then you shouldn’t bother to get involved. If you believe Chamath Palihapitiya, the prominent venture capitalist who proclaimed that technology companies “are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence” and that “stasis in the government is actually good for all of us,” then you shouldn’t bother to get involved, either.

But if you believe that the people of a republic are sovereign, and that engaging, persuading, and organizing peers to exert influence is the substance of a free and democratic people, then you should get active right now.

You should find out who your representatives are, and you should ask them where they stand on the NSA and the other issues you care about. You should join issue organizations—like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, ACLU, and FWD.us—that are already advocating for these and other issues and see how you can help them. You must, if nothing else, find and elect representatives who will fight for you in Washington.

You should do these things because there is no escaping politics, or the legal regulatory apparatus it produces. One-liners about disruption and changing centers of power make for good sound-bytes at developer conferences and TED talks, but those who wield them misunderstand both the nature of power, as well as their own possession of it. Power isn’t in a valuation, and it isn’t in the cloud. Power is lying in the street—pick it up.

– Adam Sieff, J.D. ’14 founded the Stanford Law School Democrats and can be reached  at [email protected]