It sounds like you're slightly mis-remembering this oft-cited Hacker News comment from Moxie from 2015. I'm going to quote the main bit here because honestly a lot of people in this thread could stand to think about it:
If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:
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Make mass surveillance impossible.
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Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.
It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions.