NSA

Kevin Drum is Off the Snowden Hero Train

The latest revelation about how NSA breaks into encrypted messages is one step too far for Drum:

Nonetheless, this is truly information that plenty of bad guys probably didn’t know, and probably didn’t have much of an inkling about. It’s likely that many or most of them figured that ordinary commercial crypto provided sufficient protection, which in turn meant that it wasn’t worth the trouble to implement strong crypto, which is a bit of a pain in the ass. (Recall, for example, Glenn Greenwald’s admission that he “almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history” because Snowden initially insisted on communicating with strong crypto and Greenwald didn’t want to be bothered to install it.)

I suspect the population of the Snowden bandwagon is growing smaller.