Societies without a reservoir of people who don't follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.

Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

Hardware is easy to protect: lock it in a room, chain it to a desk, or buy a spare. Information poses more of a problem. It can exist in more than one place; be transported halfway across the planet in seconds; and be stolen without your knowledge.

We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.

A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that-either now or in the uncertain future-patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

And honestly, if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.