link to original reddit post by /u/Anenome5

So there's a semi-serious theory out there that one of the reasons that big companies are buying up popular privacy-oriented text messaging apps and programs is because the CIA is urging these companies to do so, and secretly financing the purchases so that they can get access to the internals and secretly break the encryption.

It's probably true.

Several of the most popular privacy communication apps have been bought up recently by Facebook and others for massive prices. Microsoft is talking about buying Discord now for $10 billion.

Disney only paid George Lucas $4b for buying Lucasfilm which owns Star Wars and Indiana Jones, two massive franchises.

Facebook famously bought Whatsapp ($19 billion) and weakened its security so it wasn't truly private anymore, FB could essentially listen in, which meant the CIA could listen in. Etc., etc.

So people moved to Signal. Then Signal got bought by Twitter. There's Telegram, but they don't claim strong privacy...

If I were a programmer today, I might think seriously about doing this. Learn state of the art crypto.

Create a strong privacy app, end to end encryption. The strength is key to getting your company purchased by one of the big guys, you want to garner a strong reputation as a privacy app that no one, not even your company, can read the messages.

Put it out there and watch the users roll in. Collect a hundred million users and watch the CIA begin sweating. The more times some criminal is using your app to sell marijuana and they realize your app is a black hole they can't penetrate, the more likely you are to get Microsoft's acquisition team knocking on your door some day with a billion dollar briefcase.

Keep a cryptographically-signed privacy canary on your site and in your yearly review, and when you sell your company, delete the canary. No one will be able to replace it.

How much you can earn is dependent on how many users you can accrue. In the meantime, you're doing the world a favor by giving people encrypted messaging that they can use that cannot be snooped on, this is genuinely a good thing.

And once you're in the Bahamas sucking on mai-tais, post-sale, create an even better one and open-source it.