There are a lot of claims online that various services are honeypots or contain secret backdoors. Most of these claims are based only on circumstantial evidence - if any evidence at all. But it’s not hard to see why people believe these stories. Governments have done exactly this sort of thing in the past, and continue to do so even to this day.
This is the story of Bullrun, the National Security Agency’s probably-ongoing effort to have eyes into every single digital service on the planet, and how you can you defend yourself against it.
I was able to understand some of what’s being said in the video, but since it doesn’t have subtitles, it’s harder.
Imagine this: if you buy a computer from the United States that has a backdoor built into the hardware, they can spy on you for free without you even knowing it.
I think the video categorizes the approaches governments use to break encryption and explains why, despite those efforts, individuals securing their own communications and data aren’t hopeless.
Snowden’s quote lacks a bit of context. He did say that properly implemented encryption works. That does indeed mean that with properly implemented crypto, without the key, ciphertexts are unreadable.
The video did touch on the topic of hacking but it focused on backdooring standards.
It’s indeed important to try to deal with low hanging fruits of easily scalable attacks, and not be defeatist about what that particular property doesn’t address, but IF your threat model is the NSA, who has a hacking team pwning your phone, Signal isn’t going to help in that case.
That is again no reason to throw in the towel, you should be protecting yourself from other threat actors no matter what the NSA does.
But for the biggest brother, try looking into airgaps and HW isolation, not becoming a target in the first place, Torified comms systems and compartmentalization where you can.