Tag: encryption

France’s Encryption Crackdown Could Break Secure Messaging for Everyone

France is attempting to pass a new surveillance law requiring the inclusion of secret encryption backdoors by providers, to serve intelligence agencies and police.

Critics say this attack on secure communications is the worst of its kind in the European Union (EU) and are urging citizens to put pressure on lawmakers to prevent the adoption of the so-called Narcotrafic law, which has cleared the country’s Senate and is now in the National Assembly.

Among those raising the alarm over the law is the well-known end-to-end encrypted email service Tuta, which reiterates the fundamental argument against building any backdoors into any encrypted app – something that French legislators now need to hear: once broken for one, encryption is broken for all.

“A backdoor for the good guys only is not possible,” says a blog post on Tuta’s site.

It adds that the idea to give law enforcement the ability to remotely activate cameras and microphones, expand “black boxes” authorization, and further facilitate online censorship (allegedly only related to the use and sale of drugs) might be presented by those behind the proposed law as needed to fight organized crime – but that, at the same time, it goes against a number of existing laws.

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Apple Pulls Privacy Protections For UK Citizens After The UK Is the First Country to Demand a Backdoor Into Your Private Data

Apple has effectively told the UK government to get lost when it comes to inserting a worldwide surveillance backdoor into its iCloud encryption. Instead of playing along with Britain’s ever-expanding digital police state, the tech giant has chosen to pull its most secure data protection feature — Advanced Data Protection (ADP) — for users in the UK. Because nothing says “we respect your privacy” like stripping away the very feature designed to protect it.

The whole mess started when the British government, wielding the notoriously invasive Investigatory Powers Act (a law that might as well be named the “We Own Your Data Act”), demanded that Apple sabotage its own encryption. The UK’s authorities wanted a golden key to every citizen’s iCloud storage, under the guise of “public safety.” But here’s the wider issue: the directive wouldn’t only affect Brits — it would have compromised Apple’s encryption system worldwide.

This was an attempt to strong-arm one of the world’s most powerful tech companies into submission, setting a precedent that could crack open user privacy like an egg.

Rather than comply, Apple responded with a very diplomatic version of hell no. Instead of weakening encryption for everyone, the company opted to remove ADP from the UK entirely. In a statement that practically oozed frustration, Apple declared:

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by Advanced Data Protection will not be available to our customers in the United Kingdom, given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.”

They continued, insisting that they remain committed to offering users “the highest level of security” and expressing “hope” that they’ll be able to restore ADP in the UK at some point in the future. That’s corporate-speak for, maybe when your current government stops acting like the digital arm of Big Brother.

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Undercover Video: Department of Education Operating Rogue ‘Sanctuary Program’ For Illegal Aliens, Hiding Secrets from DOGE on Encrypted App

Project Veritas released undercover video of Travis Combs, Branch Chief for Applied Innovation and Improvement at the US Department of Education, describing how the agency is hiding secrets from Congress and DOGE by communicating on encrypted app, Signal.

“It’s insanity. ‘Democracy Falling’ should be the title of the movie,” Travis Combs, a 5-year veteran at the department said.

Travis Combs told the undercover PV reporter that federal employees in the DOE are evading Congress and oversight.

“The one nice thing about the program that I work in is that we don’t ask [citizenship] status, and we’ve been able to keep that out of our federal statute. So, we don’t ask them when they enroll what their status is,” Combs told the PV reporter.

“If Congress actually knew that we don’t have [citizenship requirements] … there would be a lot of uproar…” Travis Combs told the undercover PV journalist.

Combs told the undercover journalist that Department of Education employees are purposely chatting on encrypted app Signal to hide their conversations from any oversight.

“If you want to have a conversation with somebody, you do have to take it offline, but you’re not supposed to. So, everybody uses… an app called Signal now,” he said.

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FBI Nominee Kash Patel Vows to End Censorship Collusion, Slams Wiretaps, and Pledges Section 230 Work

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday was a chance to learn about the direction the agency would take after a number of years filled with controversies linked to online censorship.

Patel addressed several of these issues, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop stories and the FBI’s role in the scandal – which he said would not repeat going forward.

Patel also spoke against the FBI attempting to pressure Big Tech to get these companies to censor content, as well as against wiretapping political candidates and their staff – but also pledged to work with Senator Richard Blumenthal in order to bring potentially controversial changes to Section 230 that could jeopardize end-to-end encryption.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, was on the confirmation hearing panel and recalled that in October 2020 – a month before the election – the FBI was among those who worked to falsely present Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

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Five Eyes Urges Broader Censorship Under “Protect the Children” Campaign

A network facilitating spy agencies’ intelligence-sharing between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, known as Five Eyes, has its sights set on encryption, and proceeding from that, also online anonymity.

Even more online censorship would also not be a bad idea – these are some of the highlights from the first public-facing paper the organizations behind this group have published.

We obtained a copy of the paper for you here.

And Five Eyes is not above promoting its ultimate and much more far-reaching goals by using the good old “think of the children” – the paper’s title is, Young People and Violent Extremism: A Call for Collective Action.

Both it and an accompanying press release choose to consider online encryption as merely a tool used by criminals. At the same time, the paper is ignoring the fact that the entire internet ecosystem, from communications to banking and everything in between, requires strong encryption both for privacy, and security.

But, Five Eyes focuses only on communications, which they vaguely refer to as online environments, and ones that can allow sex offenders access to children, they also mention extremists, and equally vaguely, “other” malign actors.

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Trump shooter Thomas Crooks had encrypted messaging accounts in Belgium, Germany, New Zealand

Trump rally gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks used encrypted messaging accounts on various platforms located in Belgium, New Zealand and Germany, according to a member of a congressional task force investigating his assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.

Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), one of 13 lawmakers tapped to serve on the House bipartisan task force, told reporters at a Wednesday press conference at the Trump Hotel Chicago that the “overseas accounts” piqued his suspicion immediately regarding the shooter’s motives.”

“Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care aid need encrypted platforms not even based in the United States, but based abroad – where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into?” asked Waltz.

“That’s a question I’ve had since day one,” the Republican panel member said, before pivoting to bash the US Secret Service and FBI for declining to release the full findings of their investigation into the July 13 shooting at a Trump rally.

“They need to be releasing information as they come across it, because this wasn’t an isolated incident. The threats are continual,” Waltz claimed, citing the alleged “sophisticated plot” by an Pakistani national who paid off purported hitmen to assassinate Trump and other US officials.

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FBI Director Wray Uses Trump Assassination Attempt To Criticize Private Messaging

FBI Director Christopher Wray has used a congressional hearing organized after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to launch another attack against encryption and use that as justification for the state of the investigation.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee this week, Wray was supposed to speak about the FBI’s investigation into this extremely serious incident, as well as about what the committee said is “the ongoing politicization” of the agency under his and Attorney-General Merrick Garland’s direction.

But Wray turned it into blaming encrypted apps and services for the pace of the investigation. Quite extraordinarily for a person who is supposed to be highly knowledgeable about security, the FBI chief came across as oblivious to how essential encryption is for people’s online security – from their bank transactions to their communications.

Instead, he complained that it is difficult to break into accounts on encrypted platforms, that is, to break encryption – a situation that the FBI head said has “unfortunately become very commonplace.”

He went on to claim that law enforcement at all levels, federal, state, and local finds it “a real challenge.”

Reports say that the FBI had “early success” in breaking into the phone of the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, using tools provided by Cellebrite. This is an Israeli company that oddly advertises its wares as “accelerating justice.”

Wray did not reveal which platforms host the accounts belonging to Crooks that the FBI says it has trouble accessing but noted that “legal process returns” are awaited to accomplish that goal.

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EU Agencies Propose Encryption Backdoors and Cryptocurrency Surveillance

The EU is attacking encryption again, this time in a report put together by several agencies, including EU law enforcement Europol, and the European Council’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

This EU’s site says that this “first report on encryption” – by what the bloc calls its Innovation Hub for Internal Security, is looking for ways to “uphold citizens’ privacy while enabling criminal investigation and prosecution.”

“The main challenge is to design solutions that would allow at the same time a lawful and targeted access to communications and that guarantees that a high level of cybersecurity, data protection and privacy,” says the report.

The objective answer to the supposed conundrum of how to achieve both goals is always the same: you can’t.

Yet the EU, various governments, and international organizations continue to push to undermine online encryption and keep framing their initiatives the same way – as both their supposed care for privacy (and importantly, security), and making law enforcement’s job much easier (saying that the goal is to “enable” that, suggests there’s no other way to investigate, which is not true.)

And, how on Earth the EU intends to “safeguard fundamental rights” (of citizens) while at the same time proposing what it does in this document, is anybody’s guess. But EU bureaucrats are “safe” from being asked these questions – at least not by legacy, corporate media.

The report’s proposals include a number of ways to break encryption, mention encryption backdoors (the sneaky euphemism is, “lawful access” to communications and data), as well as password cracking and cryptocurrency and other forms of surveillance.

The not-so-subtle abuse of language and tone continues while discrediting encryption, as services like Meta’s Messenger, Apple Private Relay, and Rich Communication Systems (RCS) protocol are dubbed, “warrant-proof encryption technologies.”

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JUST IN: Trump Would-Be Assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks Had Two Cell Phones and 3 Encrypted Accounts Overseas

Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had two cell phones and used three encrypted accounts overseas to communicate.

The FBI found Crooks’ second cell phone at his home with only 27 contacts, The Daily Mail reported.

Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters that according to an FBI briefing, Crooks had multiple encrypted accounts and said more will come out Monday.

Rep. Waltz said the Trump shooter had the overseas accounts at the same time we heard about the Iranian assassination plot against Trump.

Jesse Watters asked if the two are connected (they aren’t).

The Intel agencies leaked an Iranian assassination plot story to CNN to throw chaos in the camp and distract from Saturday’s Secret Service failures.

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Europol Seeks to Break Mobile Roaming Encryption

EU’s law enforcement agency Europol is another major entity that is setting its sights on breaking encryption.

This time, it’s about home routing and mobile encryption, and the justification is a well-known one: encryption supposedly stands in the way of the ability of law enforcement to investigate.

The overall rationale is that police and other agencies face serious challenges in doing their job (an argument repeatedly proven as false) and that destroying the internet’s currently best available security feature for all users – encryption – is the way to solve the problem.

Europol’s recent paper treats home routing not as a useful security feature, but, as “a serious challenge for lawful interception.” Home routing works by encrypting data from a phone through the home network while roaming.

We obtained a copy of the paper for you here.

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