This is an important conversation people should have when discussing security. The <i>dream</i> is perfect security and trust - something that no singular person could ever have completely, because it basically requires a ton of things to happen:<p>* You need to audit the blueprints for all hardware.<p>* You need to verify, physically, the products of manufacturing - the physical hardware you will use - often requiring you to know the design and likewise guarantee the implementation of the fab process.<p>* You need to audit and verify all firmware and software running on the system - from your flash controller to your chipset to your CPU to your GPU. This is on top of already having trust in the hardware.<p>* You need to then <i>use</i> software that is secure. Perfect security - mathematically proven security - is probably the most expensive thing you could try in software.<p>It is already impossible for any one individual to have audited all the hardware parts and the underlying OS and firmware, but then they need to also personally verify or write themselves the software implementations of security they will use.<p>We all, by using computers, are yielding an immense amount of security in the form of trust. One of the cornerstones of the free software and open hardware movements are how untrustworthy a singular set of eyes upon hardware or software truly are - that having the ability to independently have someone else inspect the code, or most importantly your own ability to do so, is what gives us reasonable expectations of security.<p>So nothing you ever use you can truly claim to be perfectly secure - you are always trusting that someone else is telling the truth when they say it is secure. In the best case scenario, a lot of unaffiliated people claim it is secure (ie, free software &#x2F; free hardware). But we are well beyond the point anyone using an Internet based messaging app can presume perfect security, ever. The question is always who you are willing to trust when they claim to offer security - and to recognize when vendors are not promising (legitimate) security at all, as is the case with cell phones.