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An effective barrier is making it IMPOSSIBLE for a government request for data to be fulfilled - such as end-to-end encryption where the intermediary never has the key, like Whatsapp has done. This is easiest if implemented into a new system from the beginning design of its architecture.

It completely removes the need to waste person-hours attempting to fulfill a "wiretrap" request, whether from a warrant or FISA-court type thing, if the request is impossible due to lack of crypto keys. And at least at present completely legal unless the US passes laws outlawing crypto.

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Essentially what Apple is going for with iOS. I honestly doubt they will allow them to do that for long. There's going to be a rematch eventually.

What can be done? Building a new open-sourced layer on top of the current internet, from scratch, that's impervious to snooping and censorship by design?

There are precedents for that kind of thing here and there already, in Bittorrent, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Freenet, TOR... and as [1] said, SMTP.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766929

TLS1.2 for SMTP end-to-end is obviously a good thing, but it has its own problems aside from all of the crap we've been piling on top of SMTP for 20+ years (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TLS1.2, etc) for ISP mail server operational reasons.

At some point that mail has to go into storage somewhere so it can be accessed by a user/client via IMAP, and that's where the subpoena/national security letter/warrant/FISA court request will go. To whatever location the disk storage resides at.