The first quote was about them having nearly unlimited power for targeted surveillance and the second was about not having such power for mass surveillance. You keep confusing them.

Just stick to your original claim that I responded to - I addressed it in the second half of my previous comment which you glossed over.

There's no "nearly" in your statement. "a backdoor, or have the capability to add a backdoor in the hardware that generates those keys" is the same God powers claim again. If you now want to water it down with enough caveats it's nothing, this reminds me of how people go from "In lab conditions we can do a timing attack on the electronics from a FIDO key" to imagining that outfits like this just routinely bypass FIDO and so it's worthless.

It's very difficult and expensive to attack our encryption technologies, and so it's correspondingly rare. We are, in fact, winning this particular race.

Encryption actually works not because surveillance is now utterly impossible but because it's expensive. How you went from my pointing out that there's no evidence of this mass surveillance to the idea that I'm claiming these outfits don't conduct targeted surveillance at all I cannot imagine.

> How you went from [...] to the idea that I'm claiming these outfits don't conduct targeted surveillance at all

Again, I didn't. You concluded that the lack of evidence of public CA abuse indicates lack of surveillance, full stop, as if that's the only viable way of conducting surveillance. Here's a reminder:

> It is striking that we don't see that. We reliably see people saying "obviously" the Mossad or the NSA are snooping but they haven't shown any evidence that there's tampering

That's a reasonable observation with an unsupported and faulty conclusion. It doesn't even matter whether you meant mass surveillance (preceding context) or targeted surveillance here because the conclusion is bunk either way. I discussed that earlier but you keep glossing over it in favor of these absurd tangents.