Start With The End Points
At the end of the day, however, what law enforcement and intelligence agencies want, they can get. All the encryption in the world does not make a lick of difference if your computer has been compromised and data and messages can be examined right off your hard drive or your cloud-storage account before they are encrypted. Weak passwords, social engineering, and downloadable malware are all easy ways for anyone to get to your system and its data—far simpler than tinkering with encryption.
This is what security experts warn about when they speak of "end-point security vulnerabilities". End points, in security jargon, mean the devices you actually use—computers, tablets, smartphones, and servers in data centers where your files are stored.
Oh, and you can encrypt your data to your heart's content, but if your password is something simple like (ahem!) ReadWriteHack, then if you're targeted, you're probably vulnerable.
The good news, if there is any, is that encryption itself, when strong enough, still works and can even keep the NSA at bay. Then you're left with an even more complex task: keeping all the machines you use to connect to the Internet secure.
