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The same government that is fighting against the use of encryption by its citizens has approved use of Silent Circle's app, which allows users to make end-to-end encrypted phone calls from iPhones, iPads, and Android devices:
The certification follows other major software makers, including BlackBerry and Apple, whose software is also allowed to be used for low-level secure work.
[...] The certification may benefit users in government, but it's the same administration that's spent the past year fighting Silicon Valley against encryption.
Some have called for backdoors to be put in encryption, despite calls from the security and academic community saying it would defeat the very point of scrambled data. Others have called on greater cooperation between the US government and tech companies.
Irony much?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:45AM
Google/Apple/whoever will just grab the raw mic feed as it travels to the app... or does the app have direct, exclusive access to the hardware? They could also grab the speaker output (easier if bluetooth is in use). I suppose that if you're the target of a serious investigation they could use the GPS to figure out which phones are near you and just listen in to those (or that fucking in-car infotainment system nobody can live without). Once Bluffdale is fully operational (or the next NSA super datacenter) they'll just quietly switch on all cellphone mics all the time and have a rolling buffer of everything. What's a few billion bugs everywhere...