Living with the surveillance state

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.