I hear what you&#x27;re saying. For my part, security and privacy are very practical concerns for me...the aren&#x27;t just an abstract ideal:<p>When my father-in-law bought a computer from Costco a year ago, it was full of malware from the start. He didn&#x27;t care about the spyware--it was the constant popups, and the prompts to enter credit card info and login info that was the most worrisome. When my &#x27;mom&#x27; sent me an IM message from her Hotmail account, claiming to be somewhere in Europe and needing emergency money, I had to call her up (she was not in Europe), get her to rotate her passwords on a bunch of accounts, work with her work IT team to investigate the security breach, etc. I&#x27;ve had one of my personal OpenBSD servers sucked into a DDOS zombie army (did I mention I&#x27;m a security newb?) and had to wipe the thing, rebuild, and ponder my mis-configuration sins. Security is hard enough (for me anyway) as it is without starting on a less than ideal foundation.<p>Criminals, for the most part, are (just) trying to steal money from people I care about...and when they&#x27;re lucky enough not to lose their money, it can still cost a lot of time.<p>States have power over life and death, and there are plenty of examples in the US and elsewhere of bad people in government abusing their power to the detriment of relatively powerless people (and giving all the good people in government a bad name). I don&#x27;t want to live in a police state, where saying the wrong thing over email can lead to bad things happening to me. We&#x27;re not there yet (in the US), but we&#x27;re not pointed in the right direction either. I think FOSS, secure software has a positive, important role to play. It cannot answer the larger political questions, but it can help, if only to buy us time to have the debate before the abuses get too far.