Most people and companies don't use encryption to protect themselves against governments, even though it would not be that hard (one could use ProtonMail for company e-mails, Signal/Threema/Matrix for messaging, etc, but instead everybody seems to be using GMail and Slack/Teams). Being anonymous is actually hard.

So yeah, the only thing that "somehow" prevents the US government from spying on everybody is law, because they clearly have had the capability for a long time. And given the occasional whistleblower, it feels like it's not actually enough.

Actually I would even wonder if access to fairly-anonymous and private communication is not more important in non-democracies. Because in a functioning democracy you should be able to discuss matters more freely (at least to some extent).

Anyway that's probably off topic, and I didn't mean to say that governments should ban encryption (encryption does exist, bad actors will always be able to use it even if you ban it). But that does not mean that governments should not interfere with technology in general, I would say.

Yeah not sure, maybe I'm completely off topic here.