Long before Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany waved a new, encrypted cellphone at reporters on Thursday in Brussels — a way to foil the N.S.A., the German leader suggested, although maybe it arrived in her hand a little late — President Obama got an early primer on how vulnerable national leaders are to espionage of all sorts.
— have a specially encrypted cellphone on which he communicates with the royal family?
For years, the fight between Silicon Valley and law enforcement leaders over access to encrypted cellphone data has been largely philosophical, a struggle to balance privacy concerns against the ability of police to stop or investigate criminal acts and terror attacks.
Predictably, the US government and police officials are in the midst of a misleading PR offensive to try to scare Americans into believing encrypted cellphones are somehow a bad thing, rather than a huge victory for everyone's privacy and security in a post-Snowden era.
He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own the way other men change shirts.
The Manhattan district attorney's office says encrypted cellphones and tablets continue to hinder its investigations, preventing local prosecutors from solving crimes and winning cases.
For instance, the report says DOJ will focus on "collecting accurate metrics and case examples that demonstrate the scope and impact of the problem". In May, my colleague Devlin Barrett reported that the FBI far oversold the problem when it repeatedly claimed to be locked out of 7,800 encrypted cellphones last year, when the real figure was between 1,000 and 2,000.
Encrypted cellphones and text-messaging apps have made it harder for investigators and intelligence services to track suspected plots in real time, or trace locations and connections once they acquire a suspect's device, Comey said.
The source then sent her an encrypted file.
The V.P.N. sends data through an encrypted tunnel.
