This sounds like something a NSA/GCHQ psy-ops division would say.
The alternative is most definitely not landlines/email. We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software, including for our mobile phones. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why the mobile web must be a surveillance machine.
> We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software
I agree 100%. Open source software + hardware + FIRMWARE must be part of any long-term solution. "Long-term" because short-term, governments won't let that happen (they will always work with/help corporations to keep circulating products with backdoors in proprietary/closed-source firmware).
I think this is a fine long term goal, but the pragmatic place to make progress in the short term is politics.
I know much of the reaction to that is going to be cynicism about what is possible there, but I'm pretty sure that cynicism is one of the bigger stumbling blocks.
If you want secure communications, the transport layer (3G, internet, land lines, postal, talking to people) should always be untrusted and cryptography should be used.
However you can only trust one method for the long term which is a pre-shared manual one time pad. Other methods are proven to be somewhat variable in their implementation and ability to remain secure.
Put your mobile phone permanently in flight mode and go back to relying on landlines/email.
The alternative choice to this is accepting the fact that "GCHQ now wants to turn the mobile web into an all-seeing surveillance machine."