Facebook has responded to governments’ criticism of cryptography by giving the world an open source encrypted group chat tool.

It’s hardly likely to endear the ad-farm to people like FBI Director Christopher Wray, who yesterday told an international infosec conference it was “ridiculous” that the Feds have seized nearly 8,000 phones they can’t access. UK prime minister Theresa May has also called for backdoors in messaging services and for social networks to stop offering “safe spaces” for extremists.

Facebook’s latest project, which went live on GitHub yesterday, tackles the problem of protecting group chat. ART, Asynchronous Ratcheting Tree, was created by Facebook’s Jon Millican and Oxford University’s Katriel Cohn-Gordon, Cas Cremers, Luke Garratt and Kevin Milner.

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