Encryption: Tech Companies And The Government At Odds Over Personal Privacy

With guest host Jane Clayson.

We’ll look at privacy, security, and the battle heating up between intelligence agencies and tech companies that are moving to encrypt your communication.

The messaging mobile app WhatsApp just announced that it was rolling out end-to-end encryption.  This means your messages will be nearly impossible to track.  Even WhatsApp won’t know what you’re doing.  Privacy advocates love this.  No more Big Brother.  But the intelligence community sees real problems.  The FBI  says there’s a public safety problem when communication “goes dark.”  This hour, On Point: a new frontier in privacy, and the battle between technology companies and the intelligence community over encryption.
-- Jane Clayson

Andy Greenberg, senior writer at WIRED Magazine. Author of "This Machine Kills Secrets." (@a_greenberg)

Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (@the_zeroth_law)

Ron Hosko, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Former assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division.

WIRED: Whatsapp Just Switched on End-to-End Encryption for Hundreds of Millions of Users — "Whatsapp’s Android users alone represent a massive new user base for end-to-end encrypted messaging: Whatsapp’s page in the Google Play store lists more than 500 million downloads. Textsecure had previously been installed on only around 10 million gadgets running the Cyanogen mod variant of Android and about 500,000 other devices."

Washington Post: Apple and Google’s new encryption rules will make law enforcement’s job much harder — "As Apple and Android trumpet their victories over law enforcement efforts, our citizenry, our Congress, and our media ought to start managing expectations about future law enforcement and national security success. We’ve lived in an era where the term 'connecting the dots' is commonly used. If our cutting edge technologies are designed to keep important dots out of the hands of our government, we all might start thinking about how safe and secure we will be when the most tech-savvy, dedicated criminals exponentially increase their own success rates​."

New York Times: James Comey, F.B.I. Director, Hints at Action as Cellphone Data Is Locked -- "The new encryption would hinder investigations involving phones taken from suspects, recovered at crime scenes or discovered on battlefields. But it would not affect information obtained by real-time wiretaps, such as phone conversations, emails or text messages. And the government could still get information that is stored elsewhere, including emails, call logs and, in some cases, old text messages."