Former NSA Chief Disagrees with Current NSA Chief on Encryption

Exactly. Terrorism has never been, and never will be, an existential threat to the U.S., or any other first-world nation.

The only thing that does matter, is that the U.S. retains enough strength to guarantee the safety of it's society and the retention of it's values as other nations rise in strength. To do so, it needs a powerful economy and vibrant diplomacy. Strengthening that is paramount. Anything that weakens our ability to compete or compromises our values is a costly distraction at best and a fatal mistake at worst.

I think you really have to expand that to include physical access ... the NSA apparently does a lot of break ins and interception of devices in transit.

With our current understanding it seems that doing something like PGP on a locally obtained system running, say, OpenBSD would be fairly safe from intelligence agencies.

Encryption is not worthless. It makes mass surveillance more expensive. There's a huge difference between being able to hack into anything (which is what the NSA has proven it can do) and being able to hack into everything, all at once, all the time, easily.

Our goal should be to move the scale closer to the former and as far away as possible from the latter, while also trying to make it explicitly illegal to do the latter and ensuring the abuses get punished (the rare times they are uncovered through whistleblowing or some lucky lawsuits).

Rogers is a partisan chicken hawk. There haven't been any wars, or nat-sec proposals, or anything else along those lines that Rogers wasn't beating a drum for. He has recently retired from congress to be a talk-radio host and political pundit.