How does this rate as a 5-Insightful? None of these points have anything to do with the question at hand, which is whether and to what degree Google+ is withering away to nothingness after a trumped-up start. Purely anecdotally, I think very strongly that it is, but that's the question before us, not whether Facebook is devolving into MySpace 2012.

As someone who has been thinking along the lines of the locked-safe analogy, this argument is making me re-think that position ...

As has been said before, though, I don't think this is really precedent. I don't see how the appropriate analogy isn't a locked safe. To encrypt something is, in effect, to hide it in a locked area. The government already has the power to compel to you to open the safe (does it not?), can't imagine why it would not have the power to do so here.

This. In democracies, those who speak most loudly are heard and occasionally pandered to, in authoritarian countries they are surveilled and occasionally crushed.