[sudioStudio64]

One other thing. A "pile of power over you"...that's not helping, man. They have some commercial legal arrangement that you don't particularly care for. They can't come and kick you in the shin and torture you. They can't beat you to death and plant a weapon on you or anything. We are talking about an issue that is squarely within middle and upper class privilege in an industry that literally could not exist without government defense funding.

Take, for instance, Richard Stallman is an Alumn of Harvard and MIT. There literally can't be a place that is more establishment. So all of that "freedom" is about being able to use an expensive commercial product that was developed with RnD money from the DOD...but somehow it's morally wrong to not ship source code to a compiler? Can you see where I'm coming from here? The moralizing is pretty arbitrary.

Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law? I disagree with a lot of the laws that have been passed in support the war efforts of the last decade, but that's kind of the way that democracy works. I lost, but I still have to live by the rules.

I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable. Even Bruce Schneier says that the way that you actually change these things is through the political process.

Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

[JoshTriplett]

Leaving aside the tangent in your comment (we were talking about governments having access to your encrypted data, not about Free Software)...

> Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law?

I fully expect that they would have little choice in doing so if they received a warrant from a government with jurisdiction over them. (Though I'd also be unsurprised if they did so even if asked without a warrant.) I don't want them to have anything to give if asked.

> I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable.

Different people value their privacy differently. If you don't value it as much, feel free to trade it for things you consider more valuable. Don't assume everyone else wants to make the same trade you do, though.

I'm not advocating absolutism. You should be able to have as much or as little privacy as you want, which may even mean different amounts of privacy in different contexts.

> Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

The government having full access to the contents of your encrypted drive is an "inconvenience"? I'd hate to know what you consider an abuse of privacy, then.

The whole point of encryption is to keep unauthorized people from having access to your data.