Non-paywalled link: https://wapo.st/3Yl9nNK

The title sounds a bit misleading. So here’s what the article is really about:

“The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments.”

This is the best summary I could come up with:

SAN FRANCISCO — Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.

The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, but law enforcement agencies often complain that end-to-end encryption makes it hard to scan messages for criminal plots and for police to recover evidence after the fact.

After modest beginnings writing stories for the online bulletin boards of the pre-web 1980s, when a teenaged Beto O’Rourke was active in the group, Cult of the Dead Cow now includes some of the biggest names in cybersecurity.

That pair includes Peiter Zatko, widely known as Mudge, who was a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the head of security for the online payments facilitator Stripe.