thanks for the mental image of clown-terrorists :( as if either weren't bad enough on their own.
Isn't it obvious? This has got f-all to do with terrorism. The bad guys have always hidden their communication.
What's getting the security services all riled up is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are suddenly encrypted.
And, of course, there's no way out of this. Either encryption is secure, or it's broken. If it's secure, it's secure for everyone. If it's broken, it's broken for everyone. Now we have open-source encryption methods that are trivial to implement, anyone can build a securely end-to-end encrypted communication system. [1]
The cat's out of the bag, spooks. You can't read people's mail any more. You'll have to find other ways of gathering intelligence.
[1] within reason - clown-like incompetence will always mess up. Or even just ordinary-coder levels of incompetence. But it's still harder than plaintext.
i'm not even sure about that. i think i remember the story about islamic terrorists in europe last year using plain old SMS to coordinate their attack. didn't make a difference though, their communication was only analyzed after it happened.
so for the average imbecile just using whatsapp, signal or a self-hosted service would actually make a difference, but if it'd make a difference for law enforcement is a different matter. having access to billions of messages and actually doing something with them are two different kinds of beasts.
Isn't it obvious? This has got f-all to do with terrorism. The bad guys have always hidden their communication.
What's getting the security services all riled up is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are suddenly encrypted.
And, of course, there's no way out of this. Either encryption is secure, or it's broken. If it's secure, it's secure for everyone. If it's broken, it's broken for everyone. Now we have open-source encryption methods that are trivial to implement, anyone can build a securely end-to-end encrypted communication system. [1]
The cat's out of the bag, spooks. You can't read people's mail any more. You'll have to find other ways of gathering intelligence.
[1] within reason - clown-like incompetence will always mess up. Or even just ordinary-coder levels of incompetence. But it's still harder than plaintext.