This is somewhat complicated. I'm sure Moxie would agree with me that the trust and glorification of individuals in the context of cryptography is ridiculous. O

This is somewhat complicated. I'm sure Moxie would agree with me that the trust and glorification of individuals in the context of cryptography is ridiculous. Open algorithms and protocols make trust obsolete. Please ignore webs-of-trust for a second — I'm talking mostly about end-to-end encryption. I'm not saying you shouldn't or can't trust people, but I'm quite happy that it's optional. I don't mind a healthy distrust in governments either, but it's hard to ignore that WhatsApp, Apple and Google are US companies bound to US laws. In other words, while end-to-end cryptography protects you against dragnet surveillance it certainly doesn't solve any of the other, and arguably much bigger, problems we're facing. When it comes to respect for WhatsApp I'm still undecided. A huge win for WhatsApp is that they actually have a business model, but on the other side they took a decentralised system (XMPP/Jabber) and centralised it. Effectively what we have here is XMPP/Jabber with TextSecure on top of it instead of XMPP/Jabber with OTR on top of it, which has been around for quite some time now. Maybe that's not terribly impressive but it's great to see big companies join the privacy-by-design camp.