Forget Apple vs. the FBI: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People | WIRED

No Backdoor Many lawmakers have called for companies like WhatsApp to equip their encryption schemes with a backdoor available only to law enforcement. There’s even been talk of a law that requires these backdoors. But as Koum sees it, slipping a backdoor into an encrypted service would defeat the purpose: you might as well not encrypt it at all. A backdoor would just open the service to abuse by both government and hackers. Besides, if you did add a backdoor, or remove encryption from WhatsApp entirely, that wouldn’t stop bad actors. They’d just go elsewhere. In the age of open source software, encryption tools are freely available to everyone. “The encryption genie is out of the bottle,” Koum says.