This is a good article. Everyone has forgotten how much has changed since Snowden.
Some Laws was created.
Some revelations was made.
But even manipulations with elections did not kill any company
Don't be so defeatist.
Sure, they might not be able to listen in on those https connections, but if they wanted to attack/listen to this Joe Smith over here, they are more than capable, and still do it.
The problem with the NSA revelations wasn't that the NSA spies on people - that's their job.
It was about mass warrant-less surveillance of the american public, not individual targeted surveillance.
Remember just after the Snowden revelations all the 3 letter agencies were very worried about https adoption rising, then their concerns suddenly disappeared.
However I have no idea how encryption works so maybe my hunch is stupid (I remember that the NSA impersonated a certificate authority for that purpose).
Your words, not mine.
The person who created Let's Encrypt started it as his thesis in college. From there he received assistance from the EFF, some of its staff, and a few other volunteers. None of them are anonymous, all working in the space before Let's Encrypt. It's fully open source and there are no backdoors in TLS encryption.
> Some of the top-level indicators are surprisingly healthy. HTTPS adoption has taken off like a rocket, driven in part by Google’s willingness to use it as a signal for search rankings — and the rise of free Certificate Authorities like LetsEncrypt. It’s possible that these things would have happened eventually without Snowden, but it’s less likely.
> End-to-end encrypted messaging has also taken off like a rocket, largely due to adoption by WhatsApp and a host of relatively new apps. It’s reached the point where law enforcement agencies have begun to freak out, as the slide below illustrates.
The engineering and technology culture around security and product development has certainly changed. The IETF even adopted "Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attak"[1] as a best current practice.