That is an interesting observation of blowback from NSA overreach (stronger crypto enabling bonafide bad actors to escape detection).
I appreciate the response, as I feel like many people post here with sort of an implicit perspective that it is obvious that pervasive NSA spying is a catastrophe.
I still maintain that all of the issues you've outlined are not going to considered that bad by your average citizen. Especially in comparison to the pain and cost of duplicating Google's type of services on a personal or organizational level.
So what is interesting to me is that, if you grant my premise that your average civilian is not going to be that upset by this, so many tech types have such an opposite response.
While it may be more doable for a techy to set up secure web services, it still strikes me as an outlandish use of resources given that the vast majority of them truly don't have anything to fear from the NSA.
Figures like Snowden are a special case, as are anti authoritarian crypto activists, as the intelligence community obviously sees them as a threat.
My thinking generally is that there is no way to stop the NSA and similar agencies from spying like crazy. So if we all just assume that all of our electronic communications are non private, it simplifies the issue. (Considering the internet as public space). So to have secure computing, you simply can't hook your computer to the internet.
What is more disturbing to me than the spying is the ridiculous over use of secrecy and classification, which I think breeds far more opportunities for abuse. For pulling the curtain back on this, Snowden is a hero.
I appreciate the response, as I feel like many people post here with sort of an implicit perspective that it is obvious that pervasive NSA spying is a catastrophe.
I still maintain that all of the issues you've outlined are not going to considered that bad by your average citizen. Especially in comparison to the pain and cost of duplicating Google's type of services on a personal or organizational level.
So what is interesting to me is that, if you grant my premise that your average civilian is not going to be that upset by this, so many tech types have such an opposite response.
While it may be more doable for a techy to set up secure web services, it still strikes me as an outlandish use of resources given that the vast majority of them truly don't have anything to fear from the NSA.
Figures like Snowden are a special case, as are anti authoritarian crypto activists, as the intelligence community obviously sees them as a threat.
My thinking generally is that there is no way to stop the NSA and similar agencies from spying like crazy. So if we all just assume that all of our electronic communications are non private, it simplifies the issue. (Considering the internet as public space). So to have secure computing, you simply can't hook your computer to the internet.
What is more disturbing to me than the spying is the ridiculous over use of secrecy and classification, which I think breeds far more opportunities for abuse. For pulling the curtain back on this, Snowden is a hero.