Posted on 03/14/2016 9:31:46 PM PDT by Swordmaker
WASHINGTON — While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said.
No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration’s dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge’s wiretap order.
As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Law enforcement is now dealing with an encrypted world. They don’t like it.
Pinging dayglored, ThunderSleeps, and Shadow Ace for expansion of the scope of the government's overreach.
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Perhaps they should try encrypting government stuff.
What this is all about is the government is terrified that somebody, somewhere will begin to make sales or financial transactions that the government will be unable to tax
Maybe the government would be better served by not allowing terrorists into the country in the first place.
And the government is arming terrorists as well as inviting them in. They're not even asking payment for the weapons, they're provided free by Obama and Hillary to our enemies, and those weapons are finding their way back here with the terrorists. Because our government is focusing on slapping down patriots instead of going after terrorists.
If that were following to its conclusion, it would mean the government is allowing the terrorists in, knowing them to be terrorists, and counting on the NSA and such to intercept the terrorists' communications to prevent almost all of the attacks, only allowing through such attacks as are politically useful, to advance a particular narrative at the moment.
But if true cryptography is present, that strategy goes out the window and the number of real attacks goes up astronomically.
It is easy to for the enablers to guess what might happen to themselves, personally, once their role as enablers has been publicized.
That is, they are apparently afraid of lamp posts.
The federal government needs to be cut to at least a quarter of its current size. The only problem with that is the thousands of otherwise-unemployable dullards who would be thrown out of work and living on the taxpayers’ dime.
They dont like it when average citizens use encryption. They love using it themselves.
Id say 10% its current size, with everything except military being forced to reside in the limits of the federal district of columbia.
And I don’t care at all about the government hacks and bureaucrats who’d be out of power.
They are already on the taxpayer’s dime
Yeah, but at this point they’re “working.” :)
Could it be that they are as dumb as lamp posts?
Considering the cost that government imposes on the rest of us, that would probably be a lot less expensive. . .
NO! NO! NO! Each of them has to live and work at least 15 miles from the next closest member of the government! So they have to do everything by mail. . . except accept phone calls from citizens. The more we can slow down their anti-social activities the better.
The trouble is that anytime you give someone the full time job of making and enforcing rules with no consequences, they are going to be productive. . . too damn productive.
“Perhaps they should try encrypting government stuff.”
But then Hillary would not have had anything to e-mail on her unsecure server!
Exactly, this is why the whole Apple/FBI thing is so dumb. Even if Apple provides a work around there’s still plenty of ways to keep data secret.
They want to close Pandora’s box. The seal has been broken, it can’t be unbroken.
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