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Is anyone on FR using a smart phone VOIP app that touts their end-to-end security? Are you happy with it? I understand we are taking a lot of companies word on what they say they do, and I know that at least one (Wire) says all their software is open source and is reviewed (on the Apple App store the top rated commment for Wire implies its not that secure. And Apple's FaceTime is supposedly very secure and it is built in to the Iphone and Mac, but (a) I don't trust anything coming out of Tim Cook's mouth and...

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

It lights you up like a Vegas casino, says compsci boffin Usenix Enigma Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption - the spies have a different take on the use of crypto. To be brutally blunt, they love it. Why? Because using detectable encryption technology like PGP, Tor, VPNs and so on, lights you up on the intelligence agencies' dashboards. Agents and analysts don't even have to see the contents of the communications - the metadata is enough for g-men to start making your life difficult. "To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas...

Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled. The case marked an interesting challenge to the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which in part compels someone served under the act to divulge an encryption key used to scramble data on a PC's hard drive. Failure to do so could mean a two-year prison sentence or up to five years if the case involves national security. The appeals court heard a case in which two suspects refused to give up encryption keys, arguing that...

INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS: Phone Taps Just Got Impossible April 12, 2006: Eavesdropping on phone calls just got a lot harder. Phil Zimmermann, the guy who invented PGP encryption for Internet mail, has developed a similar product, Zfone, for VOIP (telephone calls over the Internet). Zfone, like PGP, is free and easy to use. PGP drove intelligence agencies nuts, because it gave criminals and terrorists access to industrial grade cryptography. PGP doesn't stop the police or intel people from reading encrypted email, but it does slow them down. Zfone, however, uses stronger encryption. This means more delays, perhaps fatal delays, in finding...

A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent. Ari David Levie, who was convicted of photographing a nude 9-year-old girl, argued on appeal that the PGP encryption utility on his computer was irrelevant and should not have been admitted as evidence during his trial. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is sold by PGP Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. But the Minnesota appeals court ruled 3-0 that the trial judge was correct to let that information be used when handing down a guilty verdict....

We've actually had it for a little while now and I'm awaiting more information, but this was a major coup. Here are a few things about Zarqawi that you probably didn't know: He's a Windows man. He also uses something called PGP for e-mails, which I was told is some kind of e-mail encryption method. The info on the computer was very helpful towards us capturing a number of his lieutenants. I've heard there's a fair amount of porn. Now that could be disinformation, but given all the drugs, beer bottles, and the like that were found among the Pious...