The way I see it is, we have a right to privacy. Government overreaches in years past have slowly chipped away at the legal protections of that privacy, and say that, for example, our emails are fair game without a warrant because they're sitting on someone else's server, so we obviously don't care to keep them private.<p>If we encrypt those messages end to end, they can't use that argument, because we're taking clear measures to keep them private even from the server owners. So it destroys a legal argument as well as letting us take back our own privacy and protecting it without relying purely upon an ever weakening legal protection.<p>That's why I do encrypt and advocate encrypting email, not to avoid NSA scrutiny. If one's life were to depend on avoiding such scrutiny, however, the advice in the article may be reasonable.