The CIA’s Hacking Ability
WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of information provided by an informant, showing that the CIA not only developed tools to hack every major electronic device, but lost them.
In the ongoing war on encryption — which is part of a larger war on privacy — waged by the surveillance hawks in government, the stakes have never been higher than now. As the three-letter-agencies and others that work to maintain the surveillance state have run into a blind wall of encryption, they have sought new ways to violate the privacy of the targets of their surveillance.
In the almost four years since Edward Snowden revealed the depth and breadth of the mass surveillance being conducted on American citizens and others by the NSA and other three-letter-agencies, an active battle has been waged between those who would protect privacy and those who would encroach upon it. As the surveillance hawks have vacillated between denying the size and scope of the surveillance on the one hand and demanding backdoors into the encryption used by people to secure their data on the other hand, default encryption has become the standard for devices running the newer versions of both iOS and Android. Millions of people all over the world began to seek out ways to secure their data at rest (files and folders stored on a device) and their data in motion (communications).
As a response to that increased demand, more and more software developers began to offer simple-to-use applications for mobile devices and computers. Those simple-to-use applications provide impenetrable encryption both for storing data and for end-to-end encrypted communications.
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