>Tell me. You're speaking with a friend in a public square or park in your town. You're not speaking in code with your friend. Judging by what you just said I expect you assume your every conversation is being monitored.
You should be aware of the possibility that someone may be eavesdropping in this situation, yes.
>We have certain expectations of privacy and basic human decency.
Our expectations of privacy are valid in private contexts, like a home or business. Public contexts, like a busy shopping center or the internet, do not contain inherent guarantees of privacy. Even though one can normally assume that no one dangerous is listening in, it's a risk you always take when you engage in any conversation or behavior in a visible location.
>Just because it's possible to wiretap and hoover up all unencrypted communications I wouldn't have concluded that the spooks are doing so because I would have thought they wouldn't stoop to this behaviour.
This is pretty naive. Whenever there is a large benefit:cost ratio in play, people should expect that someone at some point _will_ stoop to that level. The ability to record and filter huge portions of worldwide communication is obviously hugely beneficial to all nation-states, so they're obviously going to do it. There are even some who would argue that this is not fundamentally immoral, so it's an even less clear-cut case than things that are obviously fundamentally immoral, meaning it should've been even more expected.
These monitoring programs have been occurring for a long time, most likely since Snowden was a child.
>You don't have to show us all how smart you are, we know already -- so you can keep these types of comments to yourself.
I think just the opposite. We should be using this as an opportunity to educate everyone on the critical importance of encryption (analogous to placing your comms in a sealed envelope, instead of leaving them bare on a postcard), not express moral outrage that some people would "stoop so low". I guess if you're into that, you can do that too (I find it trite, personally), but it shouldn't be done at the expense of the resolution to this problem, which is widespread adoption of full client-side encryption.