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posted by martyb on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the hiding-in-plain-sight dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:42PM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Thursday November 19 2015, @09:42PM (#265516)

    Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne blessent mon cœur d’une langueur monotone.

    There are all sorts of encryption. Who would have guessed that the above was a signal to the French Resistance that D-Day would begin in 24 hours?

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 20 2015, @01:48AM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 20 2015, @01:48AM (#265606)

    Les carottes sont cuites.
    Je repete.
    Les carottes sont cuites.

    Yep. Carots being cooked signaled the biggest assault in history. The Nazis could hear it, but they hadn't waterboarded the codebook out of the Resistants.