[mindslight]

> truth is that a large number of Americans believe that the FBI should have access through consumer encryption

Yes, they've been led to believe this by the "corrupt elite" you so casually brush aside. It's better characterized as a gradient of out-of-touchness rather than a well-bounded "elite" class [0], but the net effect is the same.

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship" and all that.

[0] eg the skinjobs parroting the message on TV aren't directly reliant on the propaganda, but thinking too hard about it would lose them their employment.

[fixermark]

They've been led to believe this by a common-sense assumption that police are there to police. The notions of the FBI acting counter to the interest of the public or the FBI lacking the competence to protect the weakened access points they would desire are counter to basic education; people must be taught to think in those lines.

When thinking about politics, remember: most hackers are more paranoid than the average person. A lot more. Because our training tends to show us what damage can be done, and that people will do damage for the hell of it [https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...]. When the Boston Marathon was bombed, the police put the city on basically a full-panic lockdown to catch two men; a lot of people were okay with this because it made them feel viscerally safer, not because they were trained wrong by a corrupt elite. You disregard the actual state of human nature to assume otherwise, which is probably disadvantageous.

[mindslight]

And yet many facets of the government were designed from an assumption that organizations do develop ulterior motives. Checks and balances, the adversarial justice system, and the Bill of Rights, to name some fundamental meta-topics. An abstract "don't tread on me" is deep within the American psyche, yet it very easily remains abstract, especially when steered that way.

I agree with your general point about human nature of blindly trusting the biggest stick, but that doesn't mean we should avoid blaming the scumbag mass media for abdicating their traditional duty of critical analysis and turning into pravda.us. If someone wants to ascribe this to an explicit conspiracy with an evil cabal while I simply see panicked well-to-do ignorants promulgating their bubble, I'm not going to let disagreements about details get in the way of agreeing on the commonalities. Any such dissenting viewpoint is a step on the path of extricating oneself from the infopocalyptic centralization we're finding ourselves being pushed into.