>the implied means of power, the threat of force, rather than by direct military force

What is this quote?

>Request remotely-stored invididual encrypted file -> Receive it locally -> Decrypt locally.

Is there any reason you wouldn't want to do it this way. Aside from the security benifits of having the data be in plain text for as little as possible (and eliminates a centralized point of failure), this also offloads CPU resources to the local computer, which is a win from a purely efficiency standpoint as well.