content: First of all, if we want Americans to be safer we should be demanding more encryption, not less.   This is very synonymous to the gun debate. The problem with this is that Americans are, for a lack of a better word, mostly stupid.    One of the possible solutions to the gun problem, however big or small it may be, is to arm every single citizen so that generally speaking, everyone is going to be safer. And if people were able to judge the situations accurately, they would be. However, in reality, you are going to have things like a first generation asian possibly harboring some racism, and they will think that a black man that is just walking towards them is going to rob and murder them, and they will open fire, which will cause other people to open fire on them, and so on.  With encryption, you seemingly have a safer internet for everyone - except that you don't as hackers will still have easier access to things because of peoples stupidity and ignorance. Password reuse, backdoors, and so on. And possibly even worse since peoples ignorance will tend to lead them to a false sense of greater security.  On the other side, its really dumb to think that there are no real threats to America. We manage to piss off a shitload of countries, so it doesn't take a top secret clearance to realize that there are people actively wanting to hurt us. And its no question that readily available strong encryption will make the job of hunting down those people harder. So as weird and as "1984"  as this sounds, I really do think that there needs to be a good amount of openness which basically serves as a honeypot. If you work in any area of the government,  you will quickly realize that there is no evil mastermind plan to suppress citizens, its just a bunch of people all wanting to make money and the general incompetence that is present will never ever put that plan into fruition if it existed. People already share enough about themselves, if not explicitly through facebook, then implictly through all the metadata one can observe on a computer of phone connection.  The thing that we should be pushing for is the education of people to keep up with technology. If you did, then you wouldn't have things like the iCloud celeb nudes leak, because people would realize exactly what it means to store something on the Cloud.  EDIT: To people who are downvoting, please consider that the whole "downvoting in disagreement" is what made reddit such a shithole. I don't care about upvotes, but instead of downvoting, please comment if you disagree with something and provide your own opinion.