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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is a retcon. Facebook rolled out TLS in 2011, 2 years before Snowden, and went TLS-by-default within a month of the Snowden disclosures. Google Mail was TLS-by-default in 2010. TLS was a universal best practice long before 2013 --- by 2010, you'd have gotten a sev:hi vulnerability flagged on your site if you hadn't implemented TLS. SSLLabs was 2009; BEAST was 2011, and was a huge global news story because of how widely deployed TLS was.

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I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively asking smaller sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to the spread of the norm.

It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.

I think it would be a stretch to say that Snowden did nothing to accelerate the uptake; for better and worse he clearly did. But he didn't set it into motion; we were going to have an all-TLS Internet within a decade with or without him.

I'm not sure that refutes the idea that encryption was uncommon. A couple tech giants with challenging threat models will be ahead of the curve.

Google started tracking adoption of TLS in 2015, with adoption below 50% and some regions below 30%.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en

Yes. And I remember sniffing Facebook traffic in clear text in 2011. The fact remains that it was considered a significant engineering problem for them to deploy it. It was a "best practice" that most people rolled their eyes at.

Most users and system owners didn't care unless money was being transacted.

Between Snowden and ISPs injecting content into pages, the consensus changed.

The consensus obviously changed. It's just that it changed years before the Snowden leaks.

The adversarial nature of the US Government changed the threat model, and it moved from a "nice to have" best practice to a business necessity. They were caught red-handed undermining the privacy of US citizens by systematically exploiting infrastructure vulnerabilities, for example, in Google, where messages flowed in clear text within nominally trusted contexts.

I don’t know why the Snowden revelations would prompt a business necessity, at least not a rational one for most businesses. What would the NSA slurping up all your data do to your business, that was both bad enough and likely enough to plan for? What it would do to your country or you as an individual is separate from that.

There were two main issues.

1) A lot of these businesses have customers outside the U.S. Those customers, including some foreign governments, did not want their data to be snooped by the U.S. government. The business risk here is loss of customers.

2) There is no such thing as a private backdoor. If one entity (admittedly a very well resourced one) can snoop, so can others. The publicity also entices new players to enter the game. The business risk here is loss of reputation.

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