> The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. I think this kind of

> The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. I think this kind of dark-sounding reasoning only holds up when you phrase it not as “a mere inconvenience” but as tyranny, which is what encryption and privacy in general protect against. I support personal rights to privacy, and believe that we should find ways to enforce laws without violating privacy. Representative governments need the ability to alter their own power structure in order to function, and yet human power structures naturally resist change, including by spying on those who conspire against them: therefore, privacy is essential for representative government. Representative government’s alternative is tyranny, which we know creates incalculably-large-scale suffering. Human nature is at the root of why privacy is costly and also why it is necessary; however, much evidence suggests that the set of aspects of human nature we express is mutable and dependent on environment. While I would never argue that we can remove those aspects of our nature, I believe we can alter our environment to reduce how frequently we express the more sinister ones. In short, I’d rather work on reshaping our environment, including and especially our culture, to make privacy less necessary and costly, than to debate whether it is either. It is both, and it will always be both, but we can make it less of both, or more of both, with our culture. Same for guns.