The goal is to prevent mass snooping on our private data. It's impossible to prevent an attacker with root access from getting your data, but on the other hand

The goal is to prevent mass snooping on our private data. It's impossible to prevent an attacker with root access from getting your data, but on the other hand, they must invoke their root access in order to get your data. More simply: right now, the NSA is vacuuming up everyone's data across all services. Your emails, your texts, your search history, certainly your metadata; basically everything. And the only reason it was possible for the NSA to do this to us is because security has historically been an afterthought. TextSecure is the first step toward keeping our data free from prying eyes. It prevents the NSA from having default access to our texts. If the NSA wants your data, they'll have to deliver a keylogger to your specific phone in particular. That's very different from gathering everyone's comms all the time. Telegram, on the other hand, offers no protection whatsoever against the NSA vacuuming up everything, because the NSA can simply MITM every Telegram conversation as they're initiated, just like the NSA MITM's CAs to decrypt your https traffic. In summary: if you care at all about a world in which the NSA can't sift through all of your data, then use and promote TextSecure, because TextSecure offers protection against governments. Now, I've said "NSA" about ten times here, but this is true for other governments too. Other governments have impersonated CAs, coerced CAs into issuing bogus security certificates, etc, to target people they deem to be political radicals. China tries very hard to do this. I'm sure there are plenty of governments worldwide who are all working on doing exactly this. So it's not just the NSA. It's the entire future landscape of our data privacy. If you believe you have the right to electronic privacy, then use TextSecure, and make sure everyone knows the truth: Telegram offers no such privacy.