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Europol Chief Warns About Computer Encryption
An anonymous reader writes The law enforcement lobbying campaign against encryption continues. Today it's Europol director Rob Wainwright, who is trying to make a case against encryption. "It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained. "It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore." This is the same man who told the European Parliament that Europol is not going to investigate the alleged NSA hacking of the SWIFT (international bank transfer) system. The excuse he gave was not that Europol didn't know about it, because it did. Very much so. It was that there had been no formal complaint from any member state.
Given the arrogance of the NSA and other national security agencies, they can expect encryption to increase radically. This is a natural consequence of their refusal to abide by due process as well as generally doing whatever the hell they want because they "can".
That attitude is a double edged sword. And they are just now feeling the bite of the other edge as the global community responds to their behavior.
Not only will the sophistication of encryption spread by it will go from being an option to being a default status quo. In the not too distant future, if they want access to data, they will need to get the cooperation of the owner of that data... or get nothing at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure.
Sounds like the kind of secure you wouldn't notice if it was disabled.