Can someone provide a few examples of legal use cases for this type of thing? I understand people who want to protect their personal information, but these are going way out of their way to actively conceal their personal information. I just don't know why that would be a priority unless you are trying to hide something. I am not usually in the "you have nothing to fear unless you are hiding something" camp, but these seem pretty extreme.
What's legal and what's right aren't always the same thing. For example, in Nazi Germany, it was illegal to be Jewish; and communicating heavily with Jews may have increased suspicion that you were Jewish. Or in Rwanda in 1994, communicating with Tutsi's may have given rise to suspicion that you were a Tutsi. Or in North Korea today, communicating with defectors may raise suspicion that you are likely to defect.
Here are some legal, or questionably legal but morally correct things you may use this for, in the modern day US: you would like to notify news organizations about a secret NSA spying program, but don't know who to trust, since some news organizations may hand your information over to the federal government when pressured to do so, to root out the source of the leak.
You are a lawyer for a detainee in Guantanamo. To collect evidence, you need to contact several people who you know are on terrorist watch lists, but want to avoid being placed on such a list yourself and be restricted from flying.
You have are in the process of divorcing an abusive husband who is a high-ranking FBI official. You want to be able to contact your lawyer and his, without worrying that he may abuse his authority to find out information about where you are now living.
You are a founder of a whistleblowing operation, which has recently done a large exposé on US forces killing innocent children in the Middle East. You would like to keep in touch with your friends and family, without them also being added to watch lists that cause all of their electronics to be confiscated every time the fly.
You are helping to get information out of China about human rights abuses about Tibet. Given that the Chinese government has done hacking deliberately targeting surveillance back doors of networking systems of US companies, you worry that they may be able to track you.
Yes. The answer to this scandal is not making it technically harder for the government to get our information. I would compare it to DRM/piracy issue. Most of us on HN would agree that creating new, more onerous, and more difficult to crack DRM is not the answer to piracy. You instead convince pirates that it is more ethical, easier, or less risky to purchase something than pirate it.
The general citizen is not going to win a spy game against the NSA. Our only hope of preventing something like this from happening again is to put legal penalties and precautions in place to make sure that the government does not overstep its bounds. Using burner phones isn't going to accomplish anything.
I don't think the analogy to piracy is a good one. DRM is not theoretically possible. If someone can view media, they can copy it, end of story. You can make it harder, but it's always going to be with tricks, not solid theory.
Crypto, on the other hand, is theoretically possible, as far as I know. There may be holes in what's currently out there, but there's no reason in theory you can't end up with a crypto solution that the NSA can't crack. And I see no reason to think that you can't do this now. The idea that the NSA has cracked RSA or AES or whatever is just a little too out there IMO.
Rendering the government unable to read your communications is always a better solution than convincing them to promise that they will not. Technological solutions allow the individual to have control over trust.
Burner phones are not crypto, but they are a good idea for similar reasons.
Finance. Perhaps this is a knock-on effect from the industry's drug use in the 1980s, but traders are a paranoid bunch. Client communications have to be recorded, but it is not uncommon for hedge funds to have highly sensitive discussions in bug-free rooms or via encrypted voice calls (who we are talking to is of less concern to be known than what we are saying). Traders who slack on security tend to get mopped up fairly quickly.
Say you were going to be a whistle blower for some Government scandal. You want to communicate with the NY Times but you don't trust the government to not subpoena the phone records, any email records, etc. A phone that isn't linked to you sounds like a good idea.
