Even if you believe it's possible to have secure communications with the government having key escrow (it's not), protection from the government is valid.
Yesterday was Holocaust memorial day. It's still well within living memory when a legitimately elected government tried to wipe out vast swathes of their populous because they had the audacity to be born into the wrong religion, sexual orientation, disabilities or political views.
People like Willem Arondeus are quite rightly seen as heroes. Can you imagine how much different things would have been if the Nazis were able to get not just everyone's (semi) public facebook posts but all of their private messages as well and use that for targeting of undesirables? As a more recent example, the Rwandan Genocide was massively helped by the fact your national ID card identified your ethnicity.
Whilst it's easy to say our current government would never do such a thing, we find ourselves living in a time when the far right is on the rise again and the idea that they would get elected is not beyond imagination.
edit: facebook is obviously the wrong example to use here, but there's a difference between someone being able to get a legally issued court order to see stored communications on a platform, or even what data I have on my device and being able to decrypt any communications as it transits over a wire, so I feel the point still stands.
Don't forget that there's reasonable evidence that the FBI (or one or more rogue FBI agents) tried blackmailing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into committing suicide.[0]
Can you imagine if they had a magic button that would instantly open and read all of Dr. King's letters and phone calls? I don't think he would have committed suicide, but they really could and would have smeared him in the press and wrapped him up for years standing trial for one tiny infraction after another.
Did they ever figure out who turned on the lawful intercept capability on Greek phone switches to illegally wiretap Grook politicians? (I think it was Greece, in the early-to-mid 2000s.) Edit: it looks like the NSA[1], but I remember reading speculation that it was organized criminals.
Yesterday was Holocaust memorial day. It's still well within living memory when a legitimately elected government tried to wipe out vast swathes of their populous because they had the audacity to be born into the wrong religion, sexual orientation, disabilities or political views.
People like Willem Arondeus are quite rightly seen as heroes. Can you imagine how much different things would have been if the Nazis were able to get not just everyone's (semi) public facebook posts but all of their private messages as well and use that for targeting of undesirables? As a more recent example, the Rwandan Genocide was massively helped by the fact your national ID card identified your ethnicity.
Whilst it's easy to say our current government would never do such a thing, we find ourselves living in a time when the far right is on the rise again and the idea that they would get elected is not beyond imagination.
edit: facebook is obviously the wrong example to use here, but there's a difference between someone being able to get a legally issued court order to see stored communications on a platform, or even what data I have on my device and being able to decrypt any communications as it transits over a wire, so I feel the point still stands.