>>Yes, adding a backdoor increases our collective security because it allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on the bad guys. But adding that backdoor also decreas

>>Yes, adding a backdoor increases our collective security because it allows law enforcement to eavesdrop on the bad guys. But adding that backdoor also decreases our collective security because the bad guys can eavesdrop on everyone. And the bad guys can be the state. People need to acknowledge the phenomenon of systemic failure. People at large can know that the system is deeply flawed, yet not be able to fix it, because the problem is too complex to fix. One could argue that situations where members of Congress see their compensation increase by an average of 1,800 percent when they leave office and become lobbyists, where fewer than 3 teachers in an entire state are fired in a year due to sweetheart collective bargaining agreements, where police unions protect officers from facing disciplinary action for miscondict, where the wage gap between federal employees and private sector workers has increased significantly since 1950, where more than half of the 20 wealthiest counties in the US are suburbs of Washington DC, where intelligence agents are known to use the state's surveillance apparatus to spy on lovers and exes through a practiced coined LOVEINT, where there are approximately 1 million federal regulations which hold potential criminal convictions for breaching, and where the prison population is 1 percent of the total population, are all examples of systemic failure, and the frequency of such failures requires us to check government power by enshrining legal principles like the right to privacy. Information is power and centralizing information in the hands of a small government elite through mass surveillance leads to power asymmetry that is dangerous to society.