I didn't downvote you either, but I call this response the narcissistic defect of security / privacy analysis. The "I'm not interesting / I've got nothing to hide / X is not interested in me" level of analysis which is about as shallow as you can go in considering privacy / security.

Because looked at from a societal level, more secure citizen communications means a society less able to be manipulated / blackmailed / spied on by bad actors, both domestic and foreign. It doesn't matter if this particular mother never says anything interesting / compromising in communications with her child, because there are many other situations where they will. Their child might be a politican, councillor, businessman doing signficant overseas deals, political activist, dissident.

Your logic is faulty on a number of levels:

* assumes only the US government is a potentially bad actor. This is simply not the case.

* assumes the political / technical climate will never become more hostile to milder expressions of dissent between citizens.

* assumes the parent poster's communications with his mother does not contain any interesting information to any potentially bad actors

Ultimately though, with all the theorizing aside, the parent is simply wanting a solution that provides secure communication with family members which is a very uncontroversial, reasonable goal to have.

Consider all your communications, and think about the most ambiguous statement you've ever made regarding illegal activity, whether it was a joke or not. You have to be naive if you don't care in the slightest whether the government has all your IM history. At best, they'll realize you're not a criminal and ignore you. However, at worst, you'll be made a target of some investigation, they may very well find some other ambiguous or over-broad statute you're in violation of, and then it's off to court.

For my part, I used to be an active member of a political party that while completely legal and not advocating anything illegal, due to its position on the far left meant that a lot of people I associated with used to be under surveillance by the Norwegian security services, and many of them were denied entry into the US for years and years.

At the time I was involved, it was less controversial, and so I might have "escaped" surveillance, but I regularly met people who were more than once taunted on open streets by high level people in the security service who'd joke about personal details of their life that they had obtained through surveillance that in no way were relevant to the security services (e.g. asking about the fight some guy had with his wife the previous night).

There are plenty of people today that are in close enough proximity to the types of people and groups who are the subject of security services interests these days that would have every reason to assume that their conversations with their mothers would be monitored just because of either who they are, or who their friends are, or even because of the groups their friend peripherially belongs to.

It's not a situation that is particularly fun to be in, and I understand very well why third parties in situations like that would prefer not to have to think about whether or not someone is listening in for their own gratification.

I didn't downvote you. And I agree they aren't interested in my conversations with my mother. However I think they are very much interested in listening in to conversations involving foreign relatives, military relatives, rich relatives, criminal relatives, etc.

But none of that is my motivation. My motivation is purely technological. I want secure services as a matter of principle. Since I have yet to find such a thing, I use whatever is easiest, just like everyone else.