The recurring debate described in the article comes down to prevention vs. cure, a dichotomy very familiar to medical practitioners. Prevention of dysfunction

The recurring debate described in the article comes down to prevention vs. cure, a dichotomy very familiar to medical practitioners. Prevention of dysfunction has been a principle of particular merit, the "gold standard". That is, preservation of healthy status, is worth far more than mitigating damage after it occurs. In the health arena, immunization is a great example. Preventing a disease reduces suffering and costs of care by orders of magnitude. The few bad reactions, even the cost of rare fatal outcomes pale in comparison to the upside benefit. (I'm told it's a good year for flu vaccine, I got my flu shot last month. If it lets me avoid having the flu that's very beneficial to me.) As Blaze convincingly remarks the value of preventing crime is enormous in terms of the benefit that it yields. In my world, one that Blaze talks about, breaches of confidential health records are matters of great concern for the tremendous negative impact caused. From what's reported (and comments from people I know in the EHR industry), those systems are vulnerable to intrusions. If secure non-backdoored encryption adds even a shallow layer of protection, that would give a worthy benefit. Blaze implies even good encryption models are no guarantee that will solve the problems. Often said here on HN, "security is hard, very hard" to get right. But to the extent its application prevents criminals from actually committing crimes it will far outweigh to damage done by criminals that aren't caught because they could keep their destructive activity secret. I could add quite a long riff on the near impossibility of humans keeping secrets, anyway it seems not in our nature to be good at it. Too much reader torment to go on about it now, prevention is definitely the key.