Comment by CJefferson

While you could send a letter anonymously, it was also trivial for the government to read any letter it wanted.

The problem is we have switched from a world where it was easy to let the government read selected communications (single phones, letters), to one where it's hard not to give them access to everything or nothing.

Personally, if there was some 'magic wand' way I could let the government keep it's previous levels of control in the internet age (they could individually pick users and put work into monitoring their communications, with a clear low limit on the number they can previously watch), I personally would.

But that's hard to do -- it's not obvious it's possible at all, so we need to define a 'new normal', but let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.