Good points.<p>&gt; <i>Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it&#x27;s important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government.</i><p>Also, too much privacy can also support defection rather than coordination. The government may look at this and see something else: that in the arguably much more likely scenario criminals will use encryption to defect against the social order. Enough untraceable trade and then when there&#x27;s a nuclear or biological attack you may think about reconsidering just how much privacy do you want general population to have.<p>I don&#x27;t want to defend or support the surveillance state here, just pointing out that, especially from government&#x27;s point of view, them turning totalitarian seems much less likely than criminals and terrorists doing their crime and terror things.