Why are protected variables not allowed by default in Checkstyle?

Question

I get a lot of warnings in eclipse like these:

Variable \'myVariable\' must be private and have accessor methods.

I think I get

Answer 1

I guess, making everything private is an anti-pattern. Often classes are used in a bunch and as a whole represent encapsulated entity placed in separate package. They do not need to hide something from each other, but this rule enforces hiding for no good reason, increasing clutter and effectively making style (as I understand it) worse. Meanwhile, we often see that every class in package is public. I guess this is much worse, but checkstyle doesn't check that.

Encapsulation exists not only on class level, put also on package, system and so on. And I think that these levels are even more important.