Hated encryption bill should prompt U.S. intelligence reform

You don’t need anything decrypted to see that nobody likes the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, the draft encryption bill released two weeks ago. Coauthored by Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the bill would allow courts to order companies to break encryption on communications and devices for law enforcement purposes.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike it. Here are mine, along with some thoughts about what the bill reveals about our government’s approach to intelligence.

Google now lets you visit any Blogspot page using HTTPS

Google today announced that you can now visit any Blogspot domain — like, say, libraryh3lp.blogspot.com, for example — using HTTPS. And when you do that, your connection will be secure and encrypted. You’ll just need to change the beginning of the URL from “http://” to “https://”.

3 potential holes in WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption

It’s been almost a month since, right on the heels of the Apple vs FBI showdown, WhatsApp added fresh fuel to the already hot encryption debate when it announced it was enabling end-to-end encryption for all of its 1 billion users.

As of April 5, every message, every video recording, every sound recording, and every photo exchanged via the app is visible by the parties involved in the communication only and no one else. Not WhatsApp itself, not government surveillance agencies, not any potential hackers or snoopers, nobody. From the company’s web site:

“WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption ensures only you and the person you’re communicating with can read what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. This is because your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to unlock and read them. For added protection, every message you send has its own unique lock and key. All of this happens automatically: no need to turn on settings or set up special secret chats to secure your messages.”