This is always the part of the anti-Snowden case that baffled me. Those who seem to think that he alerted terrorists to the most secure means of communication seem to assume that, prior to the Snowden leaks, they were communicating by yelling really loudly across the NSA buildings. It's like they simply forgot about the biggest reason it took so long to find Osama bin Laden: he was so security-concerned that he used couriers and relays (which, counter to the broad narrative about the terrorist shift to security, actually cannot be decrypted)

It's even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email.

ISIS actually tweeted in the clear before this one. Forget crypto, nobody was reading the open sources even.

http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/islamic-state-tweeted-of...

I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who died in automobile accidents while wearing seat belts."

It may indeed be that this kind of signals intelligence isn't actually helpful, but I don't think this is a very good argument either way. If there was a massive disruption of planned terrorist attacks, it is not useless just because there wasn't a complete elimination of terrorist attacks.

The terrorists also utilized roads and clean drinking water... better get rid of those, too!

This argument misses the point IMHO: the US government was investing astronomically large sums of money in an infrastructure that was fated to quickly become less and less effective. In doing so, they were even willing to violate basic constitutional rights.

It would indeed come as a massive surprise to the 2008 Mumbai terrorists, who were well versed in in using encrypted channels to communicate --

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_...

I think I remember a terrorist attack in 2011 too.