They have similar end result for the phone in question, but headlines like this can lead to people being less secure on the whole.
Arguing this point at all is silly when many people, even many IT professionals don't know and don't care about the difference between bypassed and broken. This arguing detracts from the important news...
The CIA sees fit to ignore the security of Americans by not alerting the companies that make the software the CIA exploits. They do this to insure they can hack whoever they want, and there is no meaningful oversight and no ethical, economic or constitutional consideration.
If group with the massive funding and pervasive reach like the CIA can operate with impunity it does not matter what app or what security you think you have.
I wonder what this administration will do with this knowledge. It will be interesting to see trump respond too, rather than manufacture news.
It does mean Signal is pointless to use however. Why encrypt if your communications are picked up prior to encryption? Akin to putting your seat belt on after the car has crashed.
Defense in depth! Do you stop using TLS on your banking website every time a Windows 0day comes out?
So in that case switching to something less secure will instantly make your problems worse.
Yes, catastrophic compromise is possible, but that does not render all security measures moot. A precious few attackers have the capability for such attacks, they are very costly to develop and therefore very precious and well kept secrets, to be used on high profile targets.
Unless you are a spy, a terrorist, a state official with significant power or a dissident against the likes of Russia or China, end-to-end encryption like Signal will keep your communication private.
Maybe, if one person can do it so can others. It would be foolish to assume you are safe just because the US government doesn't deem you a person of interest. It might be far fetched, but now that the world knows it's possible to bypass encryption you cannot ignore the fact that Signal may not work at all.
This is the point of the majority of propaganda, really: it's not to convince the people who know anything about the issue; it's to prejudice the people who don't, so that it'll be harder for the people in the know to communicate the facts to them.
Also, if you these people read only the title, then the problem is not any sort of text, you should fix those people first. No matter what words were chosen they will most likely make the wrong judgment.
