I think the article was leaning closer towards: regardless of the encryption, it's much easier to smash-and-grab the key. I foolishly transferred an old privat

I think the article was leaning closer towards: regardless of the encryption, it's much easier to smash-and-grab the key. I foolishly transferred an old private key to a cloud server years ago, therefore I can no longer assume it is private. Even having the only copy on my laptop isn't ultimately safe, as it is reasonably possible that the vulnerabilities that exist in my browser or the OS may have been compromised. In the earlier leaked docs Snowden mentions targeting of sysadmins by looking for SSH usage patterns. Lookup by IP, fingerprint the device using HTTP headers (and other tells), look up the usage patterns, execute a MITM attack by injecting the appropriate malicious exploit code into the TCP stream as required.