A Little-Known Company That Enables Mass Surveillance

"[..]Alongside its government clients, Endace has many major corporate customers.

Endace’s sales lists include finance industry giants such as Morgan Stanley, Reuters, and Bank of America. [..]"

What for do finance companies need systems that intercept data?

I would assume internal network security and audit trail purposes.

Can someone ELI5 how they actually capture all these data ?

Are they basically cracking encryption ? I thought the kind of encryption provided by VPN services (256-bit AES/CBC) was strong enough? If that's what they do, aren't they violating privacy laws ? Aren't they breaching companies such as Google, Facebook etc... T&C ? Are they installing some kinds of trojans, keyloggers and stuff on 3rd parties computers ? Isn't what they are selling black hat hacking solutions ? Or are they only capturing clear traffic ? which is not necessarily very meaningful.

It says : "extract information about people’s usage of services such as Gmail, Hotmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook"

The latest terms and conditions you had to acknowledge recently to continue using watsapp (yes, I read them!) mentionned that they don't keep a record of the content being exchanged via watsapp. So, is watsapp lying ? Or what does this Endace system records ? Watsapp T&C also say that they use a strong encryption. so, FTW?

Are we still safe using Tor?

Are we even safe with a VPN ?