Americans making "informed tradeoffs" about privacy defeats the purpose, from a SIGINT perspective. If everyone knows Skype is bugged, the bad guys who aren't i

Americans making "informed tradeoffs" about privacy defeats the purpose, from a SIGINT perspective. If everyone knows Skype is bugged, the bad guys who aren't idiots don't use Skype. The only way for a crime prevention dragnet to work is if nobody knows about it, and even then the nastiest bad guys will still probably take heavy precautions just in case. Surveillance is about control; more nines of safety may or may not be a beneficial side product. There is no reason why mass surveillance would not expand to encompass other crimes: first murders and rapes, then tax evasion, then drugs and torrents, then joining "subversive" protest groups, etc. I'm not sure there is any person or group trustworthy enough to own a unilateral monopoly on all knowledge.