Encryption Won, So Law Enforcement Turned to Hacking Your Devices Instead

Cryptography engineer Matthew Green argues in a widely circulated essay that law enforcement agencies have quietly abandoned the push for encryption backdoors in favor of directly hacking target devices. Rather than breaking end-to-end encryption, agencies now deploy spyware to read messages before they are encrypted or after they are decrypted on a user's phone or laptop. This shift has fueled a commercial spyware industry, with firms like NSO Group and Cytrox selling tools to governments worldwide — tools that have been used against journalists, activists, and political opponents. Green warns that while public debate remains focused on encryption backdoors, device hacking operates in a largely ungoverned legal grey area with far fewer oversight requirements than traditional wiretapping. The result, he contends, is a new surveillance frontier with significant civil liberties implications and almost no adequate policy framework to address it.