Encryption wasn't mainstream at all back then and, more crucially, digital surveillance was still in its infancy. The most popular chat app in the world right now implements full E2E encryption. Go back 10 years and having a "chat" consisted of sending your friends SMS messages.
Exactly - and yet most criminals were happy to use that insecure and broken SMS. I'd love to see a study on the proportion of criminals that even know what encryption is. I expect it to be extremely low.
Exactly what? My point is that encryption is fairly common right now, even for average consumers. If political activists use Tor and Signal quite regularly, why wouldn't criminals do the same? I still don't quite understand why you're comparing what criminals did back then to what they could do right now.
I'd expect that currently, most criminal use of encryption is accidental. That is, everyone switched from SMS to whatsapp, criminals just did what everyone did.
Sure, there might be exceptions for high-level criminal conspiracies. But most crime isn't of that kind. For terrorist, I imagine there is a large spectrum of covert abilities.
> That is, everyone switched from SMS to whatsapp, criminals just did what everyone did.
How are you so confident that this was what happened? Do you have some concrete data and/or stats to back this statement? What if most criminals are using something like Signal? Besides, I personally wouldn't trust WhatsApp if I were partaking in illicit activities.
