Green argues the FBI's decade-long 'Going Dark' rhetoric collapsed not because Apple or Signal caved, but because agencies from the FBI to county sheriffs now routinely pay Cellebrite, GrayShift, and NSO-adjacent vendors for turnkey device exploitation. The backdoor-vs-privacy debate was overtaken by a parallel gray market where governments spend nine figures a year on zero-days that make key escrow unnecessary.
Green warns that Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement, Google's Rust adoption in Android, hardware-enforced sandboxing on A-series and Tensor chips, and Lockdown Mode have pushed working iOS exploit chains past $2M and climbing. If that hardening curve keeps bending, the exploit spigot narrows and 'Going Dark' rhetoric — along with renewed backdoor demands — will come roaring back.
Points out that pre-digital wiretapping required physically running wires and central-office switching work, and cops were billed for those lines — surveillance was expensive by default. The shift to endpoint hacking and vendor tooling removes that natural economic friction, meaning there's no built-in brake on the volume of surveillance the way there used to be.
Matthew Green — Johns Hopkins cryptographer and one of the loudest voices in the crypto-wars — came back from Usenix Security 2026 in Baltimore and posted a long piece arguing that the FBI's decade-long 'Going Dark' talking point has quietly collapsed. Not because Apple caved. Not because Signal opened a backdoor. Because law enforcement, from the FBI down to county sheriffs, learned to just hack the endpoint.
The post walks through the shift: from Comey's 2014 warnings that end-to-end encryption would leave cops blind, to a 2026 in which agencies routinely pay vendors like Cellebrite, GrayShift, and a rotating cast of NSO-adjacent firms for turnkey exploitation of iPhones and Androids. The 'dark' problem got solved with a checkbook. Green's core point is that the public debate — backdoors vs. privacy — was quietly overtaken by a parallel market where the same governments that demanded key escrow now spend nine figures a year on zero-days that make escrow unnecessary.
The essay's sharpest observation is that this détente is entirely contingent on one variable: the continued supply of exploitable bugs in consumer devices. Green points to Apple's rollout of Memory Integrity Enforcement, Google's push on Rust in Android, hardware-enforced sandboxing on the A-series and Tensor chips, and Lockdown Mode adoption as things that have measurably raised the cost of a working iOS chain — reportedly past $2M on the gray market and climbing. If that curve keeps bending, the exploit spigot could actually narrow, and the 'Going Dark' rhetoric will come roaring back.
The piece landed at #1 on Hacker News with 440 points, and the top comments are worth reading as a temperature check on how practitioners think about this.
One thread, started by user `Animats`, points out that pre-digital wiretapping required physically running wires — and the cops got billed for those lines. Surveillance was expensive by default. Central-office switching, then IP, then cloud, made it cheap. The exploit market is arguably the first thing in 40 years that has made targeted surveillance expensive again — a strange, accidental privacy win driven entirely by iOS hardening budgets at Apple, not by any legislature.
A counter from `mbroshi` cuts the other way: 'I see companies adding more sloppily written features with AI. I see more bugs in the software I use, not less.' This is the uncomfortable part of Green's optimism — the memory-safety curve is real for OS kernels and browser engines, but the app layer, the messaging clients, the miscellaneous IPC surface, is arguably getting worse as LLM-authored code ships faster than review can keep up. The exploit market doesn't need a kernel bug if a WhatsApp media parser will do.
A third commenter, `fitblipper`, makes the point that 'going dark' was always rhetorical theater — between doorbell cameras, ALPR networks, ad-tech data brokers, and geofence warrants, the volume of ambient data available to a motivated investigator is orders of magnitude higher than it was in the pre-smartphone era. Encrypted iMessage doesn't matter much when Ring, Flock, and your car's telematics vendor are all one subpoena away.
That trio of comments actually maps the three-way tension Green is circling: exploit-driven access (targeted, expensive, ethically fraught but at least bounded), legislative backdoors (broad, cheap, catastrophic if compromised), and ambient surveillance (already here, mostly unregulated, largely invisible to the encryption debate). The policy conversation has spent a decade fighting about lane 2 while lanes 1 and 3 quietly ate the problem.
Green's read — and he's careful not to sound triumphalist — is that we are in an unstable equilibrium. The FBI has largely stopped shouting about backdoors because it doesn't need them. If Apple's memory-safety work and Google's Rust migration keep landing, and if exploit prices double again, expect the backdoor demands to return within two years. If they don't land, or if AI-assisted vulnerability discovery makes 0days cheaper faster than defenses can absorb, we stay in the current uneasy peace.
If you ship mobile code, messaging code, or anything that handles untrusted media on-device, your realistic adversary now includes well-funded state buyers who will pay six or seven figures for your next use-after-free, and they don't care whether the target is a journalist, a cartel accountant, or an activist — the exploit chain is fungible. Practical implications:
Media parsers are the new front line. Almost every published iOS chain in the last three years has started with an image, PDF, or font bug. If your app renders user-controlled media, treat that parser as security-critical: fuzz it, sandbox it, and consider Rust or a memory-safe wrapper. 'It's just a thumbnail' is how these chains start.
Assume the client is compromised for sensitive flows. End-to-end crypto protects the wire, not the endpoint. If your product's threat model includes journalists, dissidents, or high-value business users, design UI that makes ephemerality and disappearing sessions the default, and audit what long-lived plaintext lives in your app's sandbox. A compromised device leaks everything the app can see.
Watch the memory-safety roadmap of your platform. If you're building on iOS, Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement and pointer authentication changes will silently break exploit primitives that malware authors and forensics vendors both rely on — which means your users get safer, and your law-enforcement-facing PR problem gets smaller, without you shipping anything. On Android, the same is true for Rust in the media stack and Binder. Track these deprecations; they matter more to your users' safety than most of your own security work.
The 'Going Dark' era is over, but the era it opened — a shadow market where the price of an iPhone 0day is a load-bearing number in the global human-rights ledger — is arguably worse and definitely stranger. The people writing memory-safe code at Apple and Google are, in a real sense, doing more for surveillance policy than any legislature has managed in a decade. That's a weird thing to be true, and it puts unusual weight on the mundane work of hardening parsers, migrating to Rust, and killing off unsafe C. If you're doing that work: keep going. It matters more than the compliance email suggests.
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