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Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today's world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one's watching, whether it's an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.

The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly.

Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.

To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.

The dark space is one of the biggest concerns on the part of counterterrorism officials right now. Comey did a good job of explaining how they jump into a direct messaging box and then go into platforms designed specifically to be secure. There's no way, even if we have a lawful court order, to be able to access those communications.

The arc of technology is in the direction of unbreakable encryption, and no laws are going to get in the way of that reality.

Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.

We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.