Espionage and disclosure are two different things. Espionage is expected and deterred as possible but because everyone has spies everyone tends to play nice wh

Espionage and disclosure are two different things. Espionage is expected and deterred as possible but because everyone has spies everyone tends to play nice when they get caught, because they don’t want their own agents mistreated. Disclosure, on the other hand, threatens the power structure of all players. People need to understand that the every person is meant to be firmly under the foot of the ruling class, and understanding the mechanisms by which this is accomplished is verboten. The excuses range from “what about the children” to “national security” but the goal is the same - maintaining a healthy imbalance of information and power. Anything that significantly threatens that imbalance will be met with extreme prejudice. JA overplayed his hand and underestimated the willingness of those involved to absorb casualties in order to stem the proliferation of infrastructure which might work against that treasured monopoly of coercion. Encryption, distributed systems, anonymous networks, and related technologies are the only effective means to provide a counter to the asymmetric threats that endanger our personal agency. These technologies are much more important to a free society than any possible harm that they may facilitate. Those harms existed before the internet, and will not go away if they are made slightly more difficult. The ability to pervasively maintain an efficiently functioning surveillance state requires the internet, and P/A technologies are critical to countering the efficiency of this capability.