[JoshTriplett]

There are two approaches: give someone a pile of power over you and trust them not to abuse it, or never give them that power in the first place. Given the repeated demonstrations of what can and does go wrong with the former...

[sudioStudio64]

One other thing. A "pile of power over you"...that's not helping, man. They have some commercial legal arrangement that you don't particularly care for. They can't come and kick you in the shin and torture you. They can't beat you to death and plant a weapon on you or anything. We are talking about an issue that is squarely within middle and upper class privilege in an industry that literally could not exist without government defense funding.

Take, for instance, Richard Stallman is an Alumn of Harvard and MIT. There literally can't be a place that is more establishment. So all of that "freedom" is about being able to use an expensive commercial product that was developed with RnD money from the DOD...but somehow it's morally wrong to not ship source code to a compiler? Can you see where I'm coming from here? The moralizing is pretty arbitrary.

Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law? I disagree with a lot of the laws that have been passed in support the war efforts of the last decade, but that's kind of the way that democracy works. I lost, but I still have to live by the rules.

I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable. Even Bruce Schneier says that the way that you actually change these things is through the political process.

Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

[JoshTriplett]

Leaving aside the tangent in your comment (we were talking about governments having access to your encrypted data, not about Free Software)...

> Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law?

I fully expect that they would have little choice in doing so if they received a warrant from a government with jurisdiction over them. (Though I'd also be unsurprised if they did so even if asked without a warrant.) I don't want them to have anything to give if asked.

> I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable.

Different people value their privacy differently. If you don't value it as much, feel free to trade it for things you consider more valuable. Don't assume everyone else wants to make the same trade you do, though.

I'm not advocating absolutism. You should be able to have as much or as little privacy as you want, which may even mean different amounts of privacy in different contexts.

> Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

The government having full access to the contents of your encrypted drive is an "inconvenience"? I'd hate to know what you consider an abuse of privacy, then.

The whole point of encryption is to keep unauthorized people from having access to your data.

[sudioStudio64]

Those aren't even remotely the only two choices here. There have never been more options for an end user of technology.

You don't have to use agree to it. It's a trade off.

If you have different requirements they are more than willing to come up with a different arrangement with you. (Yes, for a fee.)

They aren't the government. They are an overblown bubble gum factory. It's up to you if you chew or not. And there have never been so many flavors!

[Dylan16807]

What kind of fee do you have in mind for not using their contract of adhesion? Unless I'm buying thousands of copies of the OS I doubt I can even get that negotiation started.

[sudioStudio64]

Some of it's pay as you go, oddly enough. But you are largely correct that more money equals more access to these kinds of things.

There is a company in China that paid them to install Office 365 in their data center. There is an amount of money that will make them install it in your data center, too.

I just think that there has never been more choice for end users and a lot of this stuff about privacy is disingenuous. There are a group of people that wouldn't be happy even if MS released their own version of TAILS and hosted part of the Tor network. (It would be "embrace, extend, extinguish!"..."Tor is part sponsored by the Navy...I be MS gives your Tor traffic directly to the NSA."...It's really not hard to imagine the BS.)