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posted by takyon on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the usg-asked-for-it dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:23PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:23PM (#277908)

    Or you could set up your own XMPP server and stop all these companies forking it!
    Secure comms are more useful using a federated, open protocol.
    Anyway, whisper is only xmpp with a couple of minor changes.
    Perfect forward security is already part of the spec. The main change they made was to elliptical curve encryption.

    It's pretty easy to run an XMPP server. Prosody is a good server
        http://prosody.im/doc/install [prosody.im]
    Then there are plenty of clients available.
    https://jabber.at/en/recommended-clients [jabber.at]

    Of course it supports file sending and there are even voice chat extensions

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