It's not binary. For example, passive snooping and data collection aggregation (like Snowden's NSA revelations) is much worse than the direct attack possibility with humans involved. E.g. it's much less likely to be targeted by NSA employees without too loud crimes than been analyzed and targeted after some automatic scanning and anomalies findings.

And the article as well as comments assumes that the whole world lives in US! It would be nice to be protected from US and China espionage workers for other ~200 countries citizens and their govs. Moreover, that's strictly necessary to develop those countries and grow healthy competition.

And free software is much easier to review and modify to security and military services of other countries.

We all need protection from all governments that would grow more powerful and influential at any positive rate (even 1% annually) forever.

The seat of power must remain with the people, not corporations and not governments for people to have meaningful freedom.