Actual freedom starts with freedom of thought which requires spaces that you can truly believe are safe. The push for the surveillance world is rapidly eroding the places someone can not only be safe to think but feel safe to think in. The 'feel safe' is deeply important here. The arguments of 'if you have nothing to hide' do not make anyone feel safe, they do the opposite and they chill free thought.

The second, very clear, argument is that the state can't be trusted in the long run. Period. Maybe you love your elected officials today but tomorrow they could be actively out to harm you. Every tool we allow the state to use needs to be viewed with this level of extreme skepticism and even very clear benefits need to be debated vigorously.

Encryption, and technologies like it, may allow hiding criminal activity but they also provide people a sense of security to think freely and stave off political power grabs. We recognize the fundamental right to free speech and give great latitude to it even when it is harmful and hateful, we need to recognize the fundamental right to free thought and recognize that encryption and similar tools are critical to it.

Exactly! I agree about feeling free to think is important. I am a legal immigrant here on the green card, and I was randomly looking at my iCloud photos, and there were two of them where I was wearing a 2024 elections t-shirt of the losing side. The t-shirt was given to me as a gag gift, and I just had taken a picture of it to show it to the sender for giggles. Now looking at this old image. I had second thoughts. What if on the border crossing some officer sees a t-shirt and doesn't agree with it? Maybe I should delete the image. And it's not the first time I want to go post something online, but I've stopped myself. What if it comes back and bites me? Even though it might be an innocuous tweet, nothing egregious, but I just don't want to engage. And this is how freedom goes. This feels as bad as it was growing up in the Soviet Union.