Not only has communication become easier, so has surveillance. The only difference now is that it's easier for people not to be aware when their very personal privacy is invaded, and that it can be done to the whole populace at once.
It is a devil's advocate response, but can you explain why this is a bad thing? If communication is scaling and becoming easier, why shouldn't surveillance?
2. I am a law abiding, innocent citizen. Why should I have to face the same compromised privacy as a criminal? It used to be that only people under suspicion are surveilled and that a judge had to grant this based on preliminary evidence. Now everyone is surveilled. How long until people who are sidestepping surveillance (i.e. using Open Source systems that don't implement this stuff), fall under suspicion just because they are not surveilled? How long until it's "guilty until proven otherwise"?
In my opinion it is absolutely fair and necessary to scan images that are uploaded to the cloud in a way that makes them shareable. But never the stuff I have on my device. And the scanning system has to be transparent.
Speaking as someone who as a boy was tortured and trafficked by operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, I am surprized how little appreciation there is for the standard role of misdirection in the espionage playbook.
It is inevitable that all these obstensibly well-intended investigators will have their ranks and their leadership infiltrated by intelligence agencies of major powers, all of whom invest in child-trafficking. What better cover?
And sometimes, the "good guys" in their attempts to be as good as they can imagine being, turn into the sort of person who'll look a supreme court judge or Congresspeople or oversight committees in the eye and claim "It's not 'surveillance' until a human looks at it." after having built PRISM "to gather and store enormous quantities of users’ communications held by internet companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/14/q-us-warrantless-surveil...
Sure, we copied and stored your email archive and contact lists and instant messenger history. But we weren't "surveilling you" unless we _looked_ at it!
Who are these "good guys"? The intelligence community? The executive branch? The judicial branch? Because they're _all_ complicit in that piece of deceit about your privacy and rights.
Take, for instance, the collection of metadata that is now so freely swept up by the American government without a warrant. This includes the people involved in communication, the method of communication, time and duration of communication and locations of those involved with said communication. All of that is involved in the metadata that can be collected without a warrant by national agencies for "national security" done on a massive scale under PRISM (PRIZM?).
Now, this is non targeted, national surveillance, fishing for a "bad guy" with enhanced surveillance capabilities. This doesn't necessarily seem like a good thing. It seems like a lazy thing, and a thing which was ruled constitutional by people who chose to not understand the technology because it was easier than thinking down stream at the implications.
And that the people running the surveillance have a rich track record of lying to the people who are considering whether to pass the laws they're proposing.
"Oh no, we would _NEVER_ surveil American citizens using these capabilities!"
"Oh yeah, except for all the mistakes we make."
"No - that's not 'surveillance', it's only metadata, not data. All we did was bulk collect call records of every American, we didn't 'surveil" them."
"Yeah, PRISM collects well over 80% of all email sent by Americans, but we only _read_ it if it matches a search we do across it. It's not 'surveillance'."
But they've stopped doing all that, right? And they totally haven't just shared that same work out amongst their five eyes counterparts so that what each of them is doing is legal in their jurisdiction even though there are strong laws preventing each of them from doing it domestically.
And how would we even know? Without Snowden we wouldn't know most of what we know about what they've been doing. And look at the thanks get got for that...
I didn't state it as a bad thing, I stated it as a counter to your argument that encrypted communication is more common, and therefore maybe we should assess whether additional capabilities are warranted. Those capabilities already exist, and expanded before the increased encrypted communication (they happened during the analog phone line era). I would hazard that increasingly encrypted communication is really just people responding to that change in the status quo (or overreach, depending on how you view it) brought about by the major powers (whether they be governmental or corporate).
It is bad to post passwords, not just because you lose privacy, but because you'd lose control of important accounts. Asking people to post their passwords is not reasonable.
I think you might have a point you're trying to make, but please spell it out fully.
