Your not trying to protect yourself form the NSA. If the US government saw you as a real threat they could walk into your server room and taking the hardware, or launch a drone strike.
The real threat is pranksters, disgruntled employees and most importantly criminal enterprises who need to weigh their targets. The relative security of our credit cards in a digital world speaks to the measured success of small time security.
For most of us, the US government can not walk into our server room and take the hardware, nor launch a drone strike, because we're in countries where that would not be a viable approach even if we were high value targets. Much less if we're seen as just "nice to have" to get access to more data.
I agree with you, though, that the real threat is not the NSA for most of us. But many of us do have users, and do actually value the privacy of our users (and for those of us in EU countries, we have a legal obligation to safeguard the personally identifiable data we store) and so it is still of interest to learn about what we can do.
For many of us it is also a matter of principle and/or political viewpoints that this surveillance needs to be countered and stopped. If the public is prepared to remain complicit by not voting out the people who continue to deny the existence of these programs and/or continue to refuse to stop them, then we need to seek other alternatives. (Note that I explicitly avoided singling out the US in this part, because I live in the UK: GCHQ is as large and a problem as the NSA, yet the British public appears to not care at all)
> For most of us, the US government can not walk into our server room and take the hardware, nor launch a drone strike, because we're in countries where that would not be a viable approach even if we were high value targets. Much less if we're seen as just "nice to have" to get access to more data.
Being in a different country didn't help Kimdotcom.
GCHQ is a different problem to the NSA - they appear to try to obey the law but have weak oversight and scrutiny. There are at least some politicians who don't want to give GCHQ more power and who think they need better regulation.
> Being in a different country didn't help Kimdotcom.
Most of us are not in lines of business that are so easy to cook up excuses for raids about, nor have a past that makes it so easy to try to make us come out looking like Bond villains.
I'm not saying there are not plenty of cases where "just taking the servers" is a viable option. But that does not mean there aren't a lot of us for whom protecting against NSA to the extent feasible is an option that is not ever likely to result in someone raiding our servers.
> GCHQ is a different problem to the NSA - they appear to try to obey the law but have weak oversight and scrutiny
Arguably the NSA tries to come down on the right side of the law too. It's just that they do so by creatively exploiting every available loophole and making use of every possible discretion of their lawyers and lax oversight as well.
I'm not so sure GCHQ wouldn't do the same if their oversight wasn't such a joke that they were found to boast about how weak it is in one of the NSA documents.
> Your not trying to protect yourself form the NSA. If the US government saw you as a real threat they could walk into your server room and taking the hardware, or launch a drone strike.
Unless they want to use your hardware to attack someone else or building a wide dragnet or want to steal corporate secrets or ...
The real threat is pranksters, disgruntled employees and most importantly criminal enterprises who need to weigh their targets. The relative security of our credit cards in a digital world speaks to the measured success of small time security.