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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Around 200 groups, companies, and individuals including [securetheinternet.org] the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, the Free Software Foundation, CloudFlare, DuckDuckGo, Jacob Appelbaum, Thomas Drake, Mike Godwin, and Bruce Schneier have signed an open letter [securetheinternet.org] urging governments not to ban, weaken, undermine, or limit access to encryption.

Coverage at Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] and The Register [theregister.co.uk]:

The Obama Administration also recently ruled out any possibility of legislation passing through Congress that would mandate government access. That has led to a curious formulation from politicians about the need for the "best minds" to come together and develop a system that works. Or, in other words, to create a backdoor of some kind that doesn't have to be called a backdoor. The wording of the letter is intended to cover all possible scenarios.

Tom's Hardware also reports on an amendment to a French "Digital Republic" bill that would effectively ban strong encryption [tomshardware.com]:

Late last year, the French government was on the receiving end of a backlash when its law enforcement agencies proposed that Tor and public Wi-Fi [tomshardware.com] should be banned. The government quickly retracted [tomshardware.com] those proposals, saying it's not going to do that, but now it's coming back with a proposal that's just as bad: banning strong encryption. This time, the proposal is actually an amendment to the "Digital Republic" bill that was introduced in France's lower house of Parliament by 18 politicians from the right-wing Republican party (former UMP). The whole bill will be debated this week along with over 400 amendments to it.

The amendment banning strong encryption requires "equipment manufacturers" to build in decryption capability, so when law enforcement asks the manufacturers to decrypt a device, they would be able to do so. This could be a response to recent moves by Apple and Google, who have made it so only the users can decrypt the device with their own passphrases or fingerprints. The amendment was written with the idea that it would stop future attacks such as the recent one in Paris. However, soon after the attacks, it turned out that the Paris attackers used unencrypted SMS and phone calls [wsj.com], and some of them were even known to the authorities as extremists. Therefore, perhaps the reason for why the attacks couldn't be stopped can be found elsewhere.

While France has been weakening civil liberties with new surveillance and censorship laws even since before the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Dutch government recently made public its support for encryption [bbc.com] and at the same time committed half a million euro in donations to open source encryption libraries such as OpenSSL, PolarSSL and LibreSSL.

Previously: Another Secretive Meeting Between Lying Obama Administration Officials and Silicon Valley [soylentnews.org]
The Crypto Wars [wikipedia.org]

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