Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

Shame..that they wrote it in the first place.

Even without having encryption in main stream applications, like WhatsApp, it's child's play to communicate secretly. There are so many open source applications that allow you to do this, it wouldn't even be a speed bump for criminals.

Targeting main stream applications only hurts main stream users. NYT should write an article about that.

Encryption existing is an important part of not being in a police state. It's the freedom to not have the gouvernment judge your every word, be it with an algorithm or by being able to look up your every word without a warrant in an investigation, without civil transparancy.

At the risk of putting words into other someone else's mouth, it's a shame that the level of education/awareness regarding the fundamentals of how society works is so lacking.

Without encryption, internet doesn't work. Without internet, banking and e-commerce doesn't work. Really, not a single user-identifying service can function without encryption.

Also, encryption is based on math and logic. You can't really prohibit people from using it, or having it in any sensible way. Meaning that if we live in a fantasy land where this became outlawed, you'd still have any two nodes using encryption should they wish to. I doubt terrorist have the necessary incentive to follow international laws.

In fact, a mathematically unbreakable encryption is simply generating random data (aka. a one-time pad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad), and having a copy of this data at each end of the communication. Want to transfer sensitive data across the border? Just xor your data with the random data, and take the random data with you across the border. If the microSD card didn't leave your butt-crack at any point, you can merrily download the xor-ed data through NSA's mainframe, and they can't do jack about it, even with quantum computing, or any imaginable alien technology.

The language seems pretty reasonable...

"The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials who had been briefed on the investigation but were not authorized to speak publicly. It was not clear whether the encryption was part of widely used communications tools, like WhatsApp, which the authorities have a hard time monitoring, or something more elaborate. Intelligence officials have been pressing for more leeway to counter the growing use of encryption."