alt Hacker NewsLet's Encrypt did more for privacy than any other organization. Before Let's Encrypt, we'd usually deploy TLS certificates, but as somewhat of an afterthought, and leaving HTTP accessible. They were a pain to (very manually) rotate once a year, too.
It's hard to overstate just how much LE changed things. They made TLS the default, so much that you didn't have to keep unencrypted HTTP around any more. Kudos.
I think it was Snowden who made TLS the default. Let's Encrypt did great work, but basically having the NSA's spying made common knowledge (including revealing some things that were worse than we expected, like stealing the traffic between Google's data centers) created a consensus that unencrypted HTTP had to go, despite the objections of people like Roy Fielding.