Living with the surveillance state

No, what generally keeps everyone from getting robbed blind and society from collapsing is that in any system of this nature *cheating is rare* and there are systems in place to detect and punish cheaters to keep their numbers down: most of those systems are not technical but social and procedural. Among other things, just breaking a window is high-risk because there might well be someone inside who could hear you and send an alarm to a social cheater-deterrent system, to wit, the police. (Here I presume a police force consisting of thinking human beings, not a militarized horror like that in many parts of the US, which might well be considered by now a purely technical system without the ability to respond in a graduated or reasonable fashion!)

Of course, this doesn't mean that posting your home and office addresses and car location in response to a request to do so is sane: there is a low percentage of cheaters in any society, and one moderate-risk way of detecting potential targets might be to simply ask for relevant information while concealing your own identity. But just because a few cheaters exist, and that technical defences against those cheaters also exist, does not mean that the technical defences are the *primary* defences. Heck, on my street most of us have our front doors open most of the time during the summer days, sometimes even when nobody's home. Number of robberies: zero, despite the total absence of any technical measures against theft. We trust our neighbours to note any strange unshaven men leaving our houses bearing bags of swag, and any potential burglars realise this and don't try wandering in and nicking stuff. We happen to all know each other well enough that free-rider problems don't arise.

(I'm sure you've read Bruce Schneier's _Liars and Outliers_, in which he talks about all this at great length and much more clearly than you ever could. Perhaps you disagree with him?)

In any event the fanciness of your lock isn't what is keeping people out, it's the risk of social consequences which prevent bad actors from taking action much of the time. Having the ability to investigate incidents and increase the risk of consequences provides a ton of disincentive for bad actors.

There will still be incidents, you can't prevent that.

A technical "solution" does not prevent it from happening or make it impossible, either. At most the technical measure would make it harder, but the NSA has infinitely more resources than the spied entity, and an infinite number of attack vectors to obtain the sought information.

> sometimes what you're protecting against has legitimate use-cases (DRM, anyone?).

DRM, as I have reiterated many times, is neither a legitimate cryptography application (because it seriously hinders protected-by-law Fair Use) NOR a technically or mathematically sound cryptography application (because B and E are the same person.

> The point is that by making something illegal or socially unacceptable doesn't stop it from happening. That's why a technical solution is usually superior than a merely social solution.

That's where IMNSHO you have it backwards: there is never a perfect technical solution, and that's why you MUST have a social solution if you want to have any chance of making the "something" happen less.

An analogy: we will NEVER have zero murders. Currently, there is no technical protection against being murdered, but even in a Dune-like future where you can't be murdered by projectile weapons, people will murder each other with knives and poisons, or just putting each other in the pool and removing the ladder. Now, if murder is socially acceptable, there is no reason NOT to murder the people in front of me in traffic. So we make murder socially unacceptable with the objective that we have less murders.