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From Techdirt and The Intercept :
In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week, encryption has been a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports have circulated in the days since, blaming everyone from Snowden to Sony for letting the attackers make their plans in secret, protected by encryption.
"Yet news emerging from Paris, as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted." The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever.
That's not to say dangerous organizations like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption, or at least should. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe -- is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Thursday November 19 2015, @05:51PM
Simple really if you think about it, the brains (don't laugh) in NSA and so on think complexity, in that they always think the terrorists will use some complex code, encryption etc to send messages to others in their faction when the truth of the matter is it's simple SMS, snail mail letters and actually meeting each other in person. As long as they think that, they will always fail. Because dumb fucks in charge of the agencies :)
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 20 2015, @02:37AM
It is worse than that. We already know that they monitor SMS. If they are too incompetent to prevent these types of events with the information that they already have, how do you think that incompetence is going to play out when they start handling our encrypted data? The answer is that they are going to enable more crimes than they prevent via their careless handling of our data.