[rayiner]

I agree with most of your analysis. That said, between the time the telephone was invented to the time encrypted email was invented, we had a rather prosperous and progressive period during which there did not exist a convenient means of communicating over long distances the government could not access with the appropriate process. I think the whole system is more robust than you give it credit for.

[mindslight]

That seems like a pretty short time period to claim "robustness", especially with the quantitative trends the entire time. Remote communication was not so heavily relied upon in the past, whereas now it is a staple of modern life. Furthermore, the scale and inhumanity of the system has increased geometrically, no longer limited by actions of individual agents to perform taps/investigations, but instead a court order (in name only) for an ongoing wireline/database dump of millions of people who are then all investigated statistically.

FWIW, your statement could be made even stronger by saying that never before in history has it been possible for individuals to securely communicate over long distances. But technology adoption does not respect a fundamentalist approach - talking in an isolated house with no electronics was a lot more relevant a hundred years ago than today! So we need to judge the autonomy of an individual carrying out his usual day-to-day tasks in both time frames.