You know, I've always liked your writing a whole lot. However your behavior in reaction to this story seems bizarre to me. I see all these people come in defen

You know, I've always liked your writing a whole lot. However your behavior in reaction to this story seems bizarre to me. I see all these people come in defense of WhatsApp using bizarre statistics about domestic violence (big correlation with hacking?). Then someone (tptacek?) was going around saying not a single crypto expert disagrees with their consensus (trucking all over the original source, Tobias Boelter). Then there are all these jokey "Is WhatsApp Backdoored Yet?" expressions. It's a frenzy. There seem to be a whole bunch of people who take The Guardian article as "omg, after this article, people will drop WhatsApp and use something like Messenger instead!". Which, sure enough, maybe a common scenario, and worse. However, the article was obviously meant to push people outside of Facebook gardens, and into a more secure alternative. It's supposed to make you go "WhatsApp is unsafe, I will use Signal instead". One of those "trade-offs" you're talking about in the first place, just like the security vs. purity one. In this case, erring on the side of activism. As a sideline observer with very little crypto knowledge, I think Boelter presented an interesting case, while the anti-Guardian crowd reacted like crazy people, pulling fire alarms, hurling insults, and Streisand-effect-ing the story into a huge controversy. I mean, the EFF article itself, in defense of WhatsApp and against The Guardian, says: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/google-launches-key-transparency-while-tradeoff-whatsapp-called-backdoor https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/google-launches-key-tr... > If you are a high-risk user whose safety might be compromised by a single revealed message, you may want to consider alternative applications. As we mention in our Surveillance Self-Defense guides for Android and iOS, we don't currently recommend WhatsApp for secure communications. It goes on to qualify this statement by saying that's a rare threat model. However, that right there, is enough to justify the original piece. The idea, I think, is that everyone should be on something like Signal, so that merely using Signal wouldn't be taken as a reason for suspicion. If you disagree, your argument could surely be better than jokes about white text. Just my two cents as a nobody.