If a global adversary can do it, then it is only a matter of time before a local crime syndicate can do it as well, after all stealing credit cards and other sensitive info is a booming business.

And what really bothers me is that this will give people a false sense of security. At least right now I'm seeing regular folks refraining from exposing sensitive info online out of fear of evil hackers that are often the subject of news. So yes, I think unencrypted email is better than a solution that isn't secure.

I agree, and I think that's especially a good argument for email. For mail submission at least, I think most users for that use-case are now either using or moving to encrypted SMTP AUTH with certificate checking, which should be fairly robust on the local side (between you and your ISP/company), modulo the problems that exist with the CA system. For IM though I think lots of people are more worried about embarrassment than crime: someone grabbing & posting your cybersex logs online; or your comments about office politics (or an affair, or whatever) being read by snooping IT staff, that kind of thing. Some people specifically use IM for office-politics stuff rather than email, because they assume (probably correctly) that IT staff can more easily pry into their email.

Of course for that use-case you don't really need end-to-end encryption: an encrypted connection to the IM server would be fine, and maybe actually better. But a bunch of services don't support that (though Google Talk does).

You need end-to-end encryption anytime the IM server isn't under your control. It's a reasonable assumption that if they could log everything, some manager somewhere has ordered them to do it regardless of legality.

If the threat you're trying to protect against is your local IT sysadmin eavesdropping on your conversations about office politics, the fact that Google Talk may internally log your IMs is close to irrelevant. The NSA might be able to get those logs from Google, but your coworkers probably can't.

This is a fair point and one I hear often, but can you be sure that for as long as you live, you will never have a reason to fear the global adversary?

I trust my government (within reason) at the moment but I'm not comfortable betting that they will never ever turn anti-gay and start coming after me.

I said this above, but I'll say it again here: if your government has identified you as a target, there's very little you can do but hide and hope you can find another government willing to protect you.

That said, crypto is useful in avoiding their gaze in the first place. For this, vulnerable crypto is better than nothing: assuming the vulnerable crypto requires a non-trivial and non-repeatable process to break, it's unlikely that even a state actor is going to bother breaking it for the entire population.

> That said, crypto is useful in avoiding their gaze in the first place.

I'm not entirely sure that I agree. I've long thought that using encryption above and beyond what the average person employs would be a great way to appear on 'their' radar. I don't have the need, so I'm happy not trying to find out. That said, if everyone had strong encryption enabled by default, no one would stand out, which I support.

Or you know, move to a country functioning under the rule of law. I don't get this mentality, but regardless, if you're paranoid then encrypt/decrypt your messages on a computer that's never connected to the Internet. There, problem solved.

That's what ROT-13 and secret decoder rings are for.