Indeed, it was Acton who first launched an effort to add encryption to WhatsApp back in 2013. “I don’t really want to be in the business of observing conversations,” he says, adding that people were constantly asking the company for full encryption. “This is something our users wanted. Maybe not your average mom in middle America, but people on a worldwide basis.” At the start, however, the effort was little more than a prototype driven by a single WhatsApp intern. The project didn’t really take off until Moxie Marlinspike remembered a WhatsApp guy—an engineer who worked on the version of WhatsApp for Windows phones—he had met at his girlfriend’s family reunion.