alt Hacker NewsYou can design in ways such that there isn't a password to give up in the first place. Maybe the key is distributed and you need all x number of people to decrypt. Sure, maybe the state can capture everyone but it becomes significantly harder than targeting a single person and threatening them with torture.
Combine that with rate limiting and a dead man's switch.
Hard power still matters. It gets access to things like fiber closets, upstream dependencies, subtle flaws in encryption schemes that take years to figure out, information linking your networks, and more than I can think of.
Cute tech can slow them down until they go through the effort of controlling most of TOR's exit nodes and point the Eye of Sauron at you.