A few of my thoughts. Bruce did make an important point during his presentation, which I didn't write about in the piece. Whenever possible the NSA goes around crypto and other security. The agency has immense power--through, for example, QUANTUM Insert and redirecting to Foxacid servers--to target individuals. The real-issue is BULK collection, and that's where strong crypto will help when placed on endpoint devices and of course at the backend. In this sense: if we make it more expensive and more difficult to get at the data, the NSA will go after easier targets--this is kind of implied in some of the Snowden documents according to Bruce. So crypto is "less important" because if they really, really want to governments and next-gen cyber thieves will get at some of the data. But there are a lot of conventional techniques--better authorization controls, and constant monitoring of activity-- along with encryption that can limit the amount of data that's exposed.
