<i>I mean I am the "other" contemptuously categorized by my government, a vast category of people with an interest in using encrypted communications to thwart my government's attempt to spy on me.</i><p>The government almost certainly doesn't want to spy on you, it just wants to be able to find spies and other bad actors among you.<p>I have to admit to taking a jaundiced view of these complaints, since for almost 20 years the US has maintained an immigration regime in which illegal aliens have virtually no legal path to residency (despite many of them having no criminal record - unauthorized presence in the US is a violation of administrative rather criminal law, and it only become a criminal matter in the case of deportation and repeated unlawful re-entry); illegal immigrants can be detained incommunicado for up <i>6 months</i> without any right to a hearing, have no right to provided counsel, and enjoy very few constitutional protections (in general, those extended to 'persons' rather than 'citizens' or 'the people'). <i>Leaving</i> the US imposes a whole raft of additional sanctions on such a person (eg a 3 or a 10 year banishment during which the person may not even apply to re-enter the country) which don't apply to people who stay, and thus create a strong economic incentive to remain, resulting in an entirely legal underclass of about 11 million people who have even fewer rights than ex-felons. 'But they broke our laws' is the response of most people, as if the laws were not the responsibility of the legislators and people who elected them, but had come down from heaven.<p>I'm not excusing the NSA's overbroad vacuum-cleaner approach to gathering metadata, busting encryption and so on, other than to note it's not very different from the kind of data collection private actors fiercely defend the right to engage in, saying that the onus is on the data owner to use good security. But it's very hard for me to give a sympathetic ear to complaints of tyranny from people who seem happy to tolerate a system that severely curtails the freedom of several millions of their neighbors.