Nobody is attacking Boelter, or mentioning him. The fault here is the Guardian's alone, for not doing the basic kind of journalism that Teen Vogue demonstrates—

Nobody is attacking Boelter, or mentioning him. The fault here is the Guardian's alone, for not doing the basic kind of journalism that Teen Vogue demonstrates—asking multiple experts their opinion, and vetting their answers with other sources. The problem with your advice to just use Signal is that Signal is not very usable. It routinely requires message resets, it sometimes initiates audio calls for no reason, it doesn't work in landscape mode. And it is particularly unfriendly in scenarios where there is a key change (like someone reinstalling Signal in a group conversation). Some of these are bugs that will get fixed, some are tradeoffs required for a higher level of security. I say this as someone who depends on the app, supports it wholeheartedly, and uses it to communicate with hundreds of people. Normal users pressed to use Signal will fall back to SMS. This is not speculation, but documented behavior that we see happening among regular users. That's why the Guardian's hatchet job on WhatsApp was so harmful. You can't give good security advice in a vacuum. Telling teens thinking of attending their first protest that the NSA is not their biggest threat is good security advice. Telling them to use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps that have good UX is good security advice. Reminding them that their biggest threat is the person they're sending the message to, or a nosy parent or sibling, is good security advice. The article does a great job explaining this difficult topic in a way its audience can understand and act on.