That's a very legitimate point. Wikileaks is looking more and more like an
arm or tool of Russian intelligence. Has it EVER posted anything
embarrassing to the Kremlin or damaging to Putin's interests? Instead it and
Assange seem intensely motivated by animus against the mainstream, big
Western democracies in general and the USA in particular.
Spying is the job of a spy agency, and there could well be legitimate need to
break into a criminal or terrorist's device, with a court order if he's
American, and preparing the tools to do so is not ipso facto immoral. So I
can't really blame the CIA for at least seeking the capability to crack
security. Companies producing products that have more such flaws than would
otherwise exist because of the inherent nature of proprietary software is a
different issue.
I'm also basically indifferent to US government spying on foreigners. What
I'm most annoyed by is mass surveillance, warrantless metadata-gathering,
etc., of Americans. To remove even the temptation of doing that, I've become
more and more as strong supporter of strong crypto and fully free software
for ordinary people. Even that would probably not keep the NSA or CIA out of
an individual suspect's device or data should such agencies focus their
immense resources on cracking an INDIVIDUAL target, and I'm fine with that
since I'm no crypto-anarchist and with a warrant for probable cause I think
it's appropriate to be able to do that. But with widespread strong crypto,
mass surveillance, data dragnets, etc. become much more difficult if not
impossible - reducing the ability helps reduce the temptation.
