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.)