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It's a wake-up call that some experts believe is overdue. “If you want confidential communications, you can't use email period,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, though he believes few people can exploit the vulnerabilities.

Despite the scale of the breach, Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., said WikiLeaks had exaggerated the danger to civil liberties from the C.I.A. hacking tools, which he said were actually designed to target small numbers of high-priority targets.

“I don't see it as any riskier than any of the other gazillion databases from a technical front,” Weaver told me via email. “Rather, it seems more likely to cause damage from a social front by needlessly and cruelly denying benefits due to innocent mistakes such as a transposed digit or forgotten social security number.”

Others are still not convinced. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Vox this week that bitcoin’s price remains too volatile for it to be considered a worthwhile currency. “In order to make a cryptocurrency work, you need stability,” he said in the interview, published Wednesday. “The value has to hold. So, what you need is an entity that will take, say, dollars, and give you cryptodollars one-for-one and vice versa. But we know what these institutions are; they’re called banks.”