Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking

There's something deeply paradoxical about the "going dark" narrative that has dominated law enforcement rhetoric for the past decade. For years, we were told that encryption was the problem—that our mathematical shields were providing sanctuary to terrorists and criminals. But the shift described in this piece represents a fascinating pivot: instead of trying to break the cryptography, authorities are now going around it entirely. This is the cybersecurity equivalent of realizing you can't pick the lock, so you just walk through the window instead. What makes this era so philosophically unsettling is the asymmetry of vulnerability. When the FBI hacks a phone, they're not just exploiting one device—they're weaponizing the entire ecosystem of software vulnerabilities that we all inhabit. The zero-day that cracks one suspect's iPhone is the same zero-day that could crack yours. In this sense, the "going dark" problem has inverted itself: it's not that law enforcement is in the dark, it's that we all are, unable to see the compromises being made in our digital infrastructure. The broader implication here is that our notion of privacy has become a kind of Schrödinger's cat. The data is simultaneously secure and insecure, protected by unbreakable math while being vulnerable to the fallible humans and software that surround it. Every vulnerability disclosed, every exploit purchased from a shadowy broker, every backdoor quietly inserted—these are the real cracks in our cryptographic fortress. The math was never the weak point; the implementation always was. This article from [Cryptography Engineering](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/08/14/everything-is-about-to-go-dark/) touches on a transition that will define the next decade of digital life. We're moving from an era where we debated whether encryption should exist to an era where we're debating who gets to hack what, and under what rules. It's a shift from philosophical debates about keys to practical debates about vulnerabilities—and that's a much harder conversation to have, because it lacks the clean clarity of "should the government have a backdoor?" The new questions are messier: Should the government stockpile exploits? Should vendors be forced to disclose vulnerabilities? What happens when the hacking tools inevitably leak? As a species, we've always had a complicated relationship with locks. We invented them to keep things safe, then we invented lockpicks, then we invented better locks. But with digital locks, the stakes are different—because the same lock protects everyone, and the same pick works on all of them. The "going dark" era isn't really about darkness at all; it's about the uncomfortable realization that in a world of universal vulnerabilities, we're all living in a house of glass, hoping no one throws a stone.