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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?
Related: Blackphone V2
Security-Conscious Blackphone Found to Have Basic SMS Vulnerability
Silent Circle Blackphone - Out in June for $630 US
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:18AM
Are you really sure handguns and rifles will protect you from tanks and ABC weapons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:51PM
The antis are out in full force this morning. If you aren't paying attention, this is their plausibility argument against self-defense: Nobody will bear arms against the government and win.
Well here you go: Are you sure that the government, with their infinite resources, won't break your personal encryption? They gave us AES-256 and Tor. Do you want to play this game? Do you thick that they won't use their infinite resources to draw up a charge against you and then break you so that you reveal your password?
Your flawed argument against personal self defense can also be used to restrict personal use of encryption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @04:34AM
The argument isn't, "You won't be able to win a war against the government simply with weapons civilians are capable of getting their hands on, so we should ban guns." The argument from gun control proponents is usually that guns generally are not all that useful for self-defense in practice, having this many people with this many guns leaves many more people dead than would otherwise be if we had stricter gun control, and finally that having all these weapons wouldn't enable you to defeat the government. In other words, they say that lax gun control laws have too few pros and too many cons to be justifiable. You have pretended like their only argument for having stricter gun control is that having little to no gun control isn't effective at preventing tyranny, which is dishonest.
As for encryption, the situation is simply not comparable. Sure, it's possible to break even the strongest encryption with current hardware, but it would take such a long time that it's simply not feasible. Not even the government has unlimited resources; there's simply no such thing. Furthermore, they have lots of encryption they want to crack, so succeeding in doing so a few times wouldn't be enough for them. And sure, maybe our capabilities will improve and encryption that was once practically uncrackable will become more easily crackable, but even then the encryption can be useful in making *mass* surveillance more difficult.
I would say that it's less likely for you to be able to win a war against the government using civilian firearms than it is for people to secure themselves using encryption that's good enough for their purposes.