Manhattan DA Pressures Google and Apple To Kill Zero Knowledge Encryption (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In a speech to the 6th Annual Financial Crimes and Cybersecurity Symposium, New York County District Attorney for Manhattan Cyrus Vance Jr. has appealed to the tech community — specifically citing Google and Apple — to "do the right thing" and end zero-knowledge encryption in mobile operating systems. Vance Jr. praised FBI director James Comey for his 'outspoken' and 'fearless' advocacy against zero knowledge encryption, and uses the recent attacks on Paris as further justification for returning encryption keys to the cloud, so that communications providers can once again comply with court orders.

Comments

Except they used regular SMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Event the Old York Times had to pull its crap article about encryption.

Re:Except they used regular SMS

[Richard_at_work]

Yes they did - but the message the Paris investigators found which led them to perform the raid on Wednesday was recovered from an unencrypted phone and not from traffic capture.

Don't get me wrong, I support zero knowledge encryption where possible, but having access to the phone contents reportedly did allow investigators to make headway in France.

Paris terrorists used regular SMS

[Henriok]

but the terrorists in Paris seems to have used plain old unencrypted SMS, in French no less. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Governments think terrorists are stupid

[JoeyRox]

The encryption is genie is already out of the bottle - there are already apps available to facilitate encrypted communications. The government seems to think that if they add encryption backdoors to newer apps/services that the terrorists will be dumb enough to use them instead of what's available now.

Re:Praise be to Putin

[unixisc]

at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.

Putin's, peace be upon him, strikes against ISIS are, at best, half-hearted and at worst a sham. He is not fighting against ISIS, he is fighting for Assad — a decades-long client of the USSR/Russia. Because of Russia's strikes against anti-Assad fighters, ISIS was, actually, been able to gain ground in Syria on several occasions.

Considering the post-tragedy rise of Le Pen and other European nationalists, who tend to be Putin's, peace be upon him, clients themselves, one may argue, Putin had a hand in the Paris-attack himself. Whether that's true or not, the sentiment such as yours certainly illustrates, how he benefited from it.

I have no love the Nobel Peace Prize winner we are saddled with — his foreign policy is as destructive as the internal ones — but praising Putin seems outright dumb. Obama will be gone in a year, Putin will remain a menacing danger for as long as he lives — and the asshole is fit, hale and healthy...

This was true before that Russian airliner went down in the Sinai, and ISIS so helpfully claimed responsibility. Putin, as well as Beijing, back Assad b'cos that's their lone surviving customer for Soviet era weapons. Previously, Moscow had Saddam, Gadaffi and Assad all. First Saddam was toppled, then Gadaffi, and now both Russia and China risk losing their last customer of weaponry - Syria. Which is why they are fighting tooth and nail to save him.

However, ISIS is no ally of Russia, and in fact, Russia has a dim view of Sunni Jihadis - like the Chechens, the Islamic movement of Turkestan and other Jihadi movements in Russia, like the Tatars. So Russia is more than happy to take out ISIS. It's just that w/ al Nusra and the FSA being closer to Damascus than ISIS was, they were a higher priority for Putin, but now, w/ this Russian plane going down, ISIS kicked themselves up in the scheduler list.