This simply won’t do, at a time when Twitter is a trusted communication platform for hundreds of millions of people around the world, as well as for global leaders. The debate around what sort of damage hackers could do by tweeting incendiary messages from the verified accounts of powerful people rages on, but it’s clear that they could do more harm by snooping on private correspondence. US Senator Ron Wyden raised this concern last week in a statement, noting that he’d discussed the issue back in September 2018 with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The company is said to have been working on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for DMs as far back as May 2018, but there’s still no sign of that feature on the horizon. [Read: Everything we know about how Twitter’s biggest hack went down] In a post this week, the tech policy-focused nonprofit Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) highlighted the dangers of unsecured DMs in its call for E2EE to be implemented on Twitter’s messaging service: We don’t need any more signals that this is the logical next step for Twitter in the evolution of its product. As the tool of choice for so many voices, both in power and those fighting the abuse of power, it’s now obliged to secure their communications just as so many other companies have.
