>This comment in particular seems to imply that government agencies can break e2e encryption. I don't know about that, there is much speculation on all sides.

>This comment in particular seems to imply that government agencies can break e2e encryption. I don't know about that, there is much speculation on all sides. However, I would say that if the FBI/NSA/CIA decides that you, specifically and in particular, are someone they want to surveil, there's probably not much the average person could do about it. Once you're finding yourself having to take photos of your desktops motherboard to make sure no one is replacing chips on it while you're at work, it's probably only a matter of time until you lose that fight. The main point of wide-spread e2e encryption is to force such agencies to actually make those choices. The reason they're doing dragnet surveillance is basically because they can. We're handing them a buffet, no one should be surprised they're digging in. The good news is that if we act en masse, we don't have to raise the standard of security by very much to make dragnet surveillance impractical. The HTTPS everywhere initiative is a great example of this. End users are having to do basically nothing, and yet we're cutting off a whole category of the dragnet in one go. If we can pull a similar coup in email, we'll have made real progress.