@dredmorbius

I have no doubt of your good intentions, and if my argument seemed like a personal attack, I apologize. I am not talking about privacy issues in general, but specifically technical implementation of cryptographic systems, my main argument being that your pessimism about their feasibility is unfounded.

Now to continue being the abrasive pedant that I am:

- Crytpography and surveillence avoidance are hard.

Cryptograpohy and surveilence avoidance are two different thing, and the OP was about a critical cryptographic system failure. They didn't manage to somehow steal some keys or break into a house with some state of the art metaphysical mambo jumbo(I'm looking at you, quantum computer!), they just had a master key to every house and people didn't even have a clue.

- Past proclamations that FS/OS systems will inevitably result in greater freedoms and less surveillance have ... proved premature.

Can you give me an example of free and open source software running on free and open source hardware today? Fully free and open source systems have never even been deployed on anything but passionate hobbyist scale, and my whole argument was that in industry crippled by proprietary software norms, even the few existing FOSS projects are measuring up to the same norms, and their success or failure doesn't prove anything. But I guess you just TLDR, as you repeat this argument verbatim.

- Security and freedom aren't products, they're processes.

The only thing that is a process there is the human factor, again the OP was not about the human factor, it was a most embarrassing system failure. The system themselves, as a whole including the hardware, are most definitely products.

- Complexity increases capabilities but reduces reliability.

That's what a caveman would say about building a skyscraper(or even a humble 5 story building) looking at a bunch of others miserably failing to put a tent up. A very compelling argument in that setting, except that it is false.

@fsi