"The FBI says they're 'going dark.' Well yeah, because they've been staring at the sun." //

So, is surveillance really "going dark"? Or is this, as Graham suggested, "a Golden Age of Surveillance," where even more privacy is required? Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Chief Technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), leans toward the latter.

"The FBI says they're 'going dark'," Hall told Ars. "Well yeah, because they've been staring at the sun." //

HTTPS has had the biggest effect so far, and the changes in TLS will further close the door on surveillance. In 2013, less than 30% of Web traffic was encrypted, and less than 10% of websites supported secure connections. By 2017, more than half of the Web supported HTTPS, and today over 70% of Web traffic is encrypted, based on data from Google and Let's Encrypt. As of April 2019, 91% of webpages visited by US users were secured. Internationally, about 85% of webpages visited were encrypted.

Adoption of encryption for email traffic—both between client and server and from provider to provider—also grew dramatically as a direct result of the Snowden revelations. In early 2014, only about a quarter of the email traffic between Google and other providers was encrypted. Now, it's over 75%.