As outlined in the NSA recruitment audio, the term "adversary" includes everyone - not just terrorists. There is nobody who is not considered to be an "adversary", so that includes commercial rivals too.
There was a time when I used to wonder why sovereign states like Russia or China built their own variant of Facebook and Twitter instead of using the original.
I thought that language or cultural barriers prevented those companies from succeeding or that those countries suppressed US companies because they are evil and want to control their population.
Today I think I'm more realistic about that. All sides want to control their population (US included), and no one wants foreign countries to access data of their citizens.
That's why there's so much redundancy. China would never allow Facebook to succeed in their market and the US wouldn't allow Sina Weibo, Renren or Vkontakte to succeed on their market.
The US wouldn't ban those companies outright (like China did), but there would be a media campaign against them and the COMMUNIST THREAT that those companies pose to the minds of our innocent children in the west, which basically would have the same effect.
NSA collects intelligence from people so that US policymakers make informed decisions (like about Russia invading Crimea or how badly Malaysia is lying to the world), same as every other intel agency does for their home country. Big difference is that NSA won't give their analysis to private companies. In many countries, things like State-Owned Enterprises blur the things and economic espionage is widespread.
This sounds like something a NSA/GCHQ psy-ops division would say.
The alternative is most definitely not landlines/email. We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software, including for our mobile phones. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why the mobile web must be a surveillance machine.
> We can and must demand free verifiably-secure hardware and software
I agree 100%. Open source software + hardware + FIRMWARE must be part of any long-term solution. "Long-term" because short-term, governments won't let that happen (they will always work with/help corporations to keep circulating products with backdoors in proprietary/closed-source firmware).
I think this is a fine long term goal, but the pragmatic place to make progress in the short term is politics.
I know much of the reaction to that is going to be cynicism about what is possible there, but I'm pretty sure that cynicism is one of the bigger stumbling blocks.
If you want secure communications, the transport layer (3G, internet, land lines, postal, talking to people) should always be untrusted and cryptography should be used.
However you can only trust one method for the long term which is a pre-shared manual one time pad. Other methods are proven to be somewhat variable in their implementation and ability to remain secure.
