The most effective argument never used during the Snowden debate
How much should it cost to hack a $100 computer? No really, poll it. Make opinion polls, get people to print them out and mail their congressmen. Have the statistical distribution per decile listed. Fortunately, we had the NSA make the hard decision on how secure computers should be. The average person is not capable of making a tradeoff between freedom and security. This is an unfortunate limit to democracy, people will only demand what is in their own interests, not preventing the creation of victims. Perhaps terrorism could be limited in impact by limiting coverage of it altogether, but journalists can't help themselves or listen to anyone. If there was proof otherwise, it'd make people question everything. The cost of securing a computer is only available to the biggest companies with economies of scale, small businesses are out of luck. An estimate of losses to economic espionage is $100 billion a year. Thus the value of American economic insecurity must be greater than that of secure computing for everyone.
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Ryan Carboni