[silentOpen]

FTA:

  At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to
  combating terror threats from the Islamic State,
  Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies
  marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
  themselves beyond the law.”

The state and the law are separate entities, Mr. Comey. It concerns me that, in your mind, you have conflated the power of the state with the normativity of the law.

In the twentieth century, the modern state gained the power to destroy all life on Earth. In the twenty-first century, the modern state and the modern citizen gained the power of private machine-assisted telepathy, memory, and computation. The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society.

[freakonom]

You have it backwards.

The state and its avatars recognize that they can and must have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if they wish to fester in society.

[hahainternet]

> The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society

This sounds lovely, except it's just absolute nonsense. For many thousands of years states have maintained the power to restrict citizens communications and almost since the invention of the telegraph they have been able to be monitored in some form. Despite this we are freer than ever.

Healthy and free societies are not built upon a base of unlimited freedom, that is all but anarchy.

[blisterpeanuts]

Not nonsense at all, just an idealized view of things that doesn't always mesh with reality.

Freedom is not a static thing; it's a constant conflict between various parties. It's a balance.

Various entities within the government are always trying to wrest more control of individuals, more information about their lives, all with the justification of achieving incrementally better service to society and the world.

We the citizens of industrial societies need to come to a consensus as to how much freedom we should have, versus how much we should sacrifice for the sake of collective safety and security. We are nowhere near an agreement at this time.

[Zigurd]

We are not freer than ever. The ability to make fundamental change in our political systems is more contained to a narrow and doomed range near the status quo than ever.

"Anarchy." You keep using that word. You are equating the potential for absolute privacy in communication with "anarchy." Do you have an explanation for how that is the vanguard of anarchy?

Freedom: Supposedly enlightened places like the US are governed under a system where the rights of individuals are assumed to be open-ended and expanding as new technologies enable more freedom travel, communicate, etc., and the powers of government are fenced-in until the people consent to extend those powers.

[scarmig]

It is an interesting and revealing quirk, though, to equate privacy with the abolishment of the State.

[atlantic]

Who said anything about unlimited freedom? Keeping a few secrets from the state, namely the contents of your mobile phone, is a very limited and modest freedom, and one worth defending. And having that extra bit of privacy is hardly going to unleash the forces of anarchy and chaos.