Encrypted messaging hides content. The fact of communication, its frequency, its timing, and the parties involved stay visible to observers. Hayden was on record about acting on that data.

Transport architectures sit on a latency-anonymity tradeoff. A VPN relocates trust to one provider in exchange for speed. Tor distributes trust across multiple relays so no single hop learns both endpoints, and mixnets defeat timing correlation through batching and reordering at a higher latency cost.