> rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it

One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.

I agree, but that still isn't a net loss in privacy. We can still communicate the way we could, except now we also would like an unbreakable way of communicating online.

I understand of course that scale is an issue online, but that doesn't affect the idea that encryption gives us basically unbreakable communication over a distance, and removing it is not eroding our last vestiges of privacy.

It's making privacy more expensive and rare, while making surveillance cheaper and more common. Do we have to wait until it is literally impossible to share a single word in private before we start to worry?

> Do we have to wait until it is literally impossible to share a single word in private before we start to worry?

No one is saying anything like that.

The fact that most communication has moved online means that there's significantly less physical mail traffic than back in the day, so maybe physical mail is not secure either if total capacity is now below what the government can monitor?

Active effort. It also can't just be done passively or archived for later optional analysis by computers or humans.

Further, usually, a judge has to approve. There's at least some oversight and reasonable cause involved.

> One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

It's recently started to emerge that US opened and censored all international mail 1950-1989. We're talking millions of letters a week. It started as a measure to remove all reference to US use of biological weapons in the Korean War and grew from there. (the third season of the Blowback Podcast did a couple of interviews which covered it really well.)

That’s rubbish. Two people could go somewhere they wouldn’t be heard and have a private conversation. Encryption provides no more challenge to investigation than that option that has existed forever…

> Two people could go somewhere they wouldn’t be heard and have a private conversation

This is still the case. That's not a good example of privacy being eroded.

It is, because this used to apply to most conversations. Even when overheard, they would likely be forgotten by who heard them, not have heard everything, not known who was talking, etc. If the conversation became interesting for an investigation, simply finding a witness would take significant time from limited police officers, the witness may not wish to cooperate, their memory would be imperfect, and perhaps most importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge, via gossip, what the police is snooping for.

Now most conversations have moved online, and a secret record can be cheaply created of exactly who is talking to who, when, how often, and in the absence of encryption, even what they are saying. Phones we all carry, even without spyware apps, can be located through signal triangulation, before we even get to facial recognition and omnipresent cameras, smartphone or otherwise.

That, theoretically, we can recover some of the privacy we used to have (so long as we don't get targeted surveillance, which has become so effective defeating it is nearly hopeless), does not mean that, in practice, privacy has been massively eroded for the average person.

You could always just not write things down. The government is prohibited from torturing information out of people.

The numerous people tortured by the government at GITMO and at CIA black sites around the world will be comforted in knowing this.